• U.S.

Nation: Life in Oil City, U.S.A.

3 minute read
TIME

When Mormon scouts wandered through the Bear River Valley of southwestern Wyoming in the 1840s, they found oil flowing into streams and used it to grease the axles of their wagons. But it was not until 1974, when a deep pool of oil was tapped at Pineview Field outside the small town of Evanston, that the rush began.

Wells now pump oil right out from underneath Main Street, and dozens more dot the surrounding buttes. Cranes lay down sections of pipe across snow and sagebrush that will carry gas from well to processing plants. Helicopters whir overhead. Hundreds of workers live in trailers and tents in fields, along the river banks, or wherever a friendly rancher will let them camp.

An estimated $250 million has been spent on exploration and drilling around Evanston. Amoco and Chevron are spending a total of $700,000 to build two gas processing plants. “We’ll be here years from now and still growing,” says Garret Eckerdt, an engineer for Chevron. “We haven’t even found the edges of the thing yet.”

Though road signs outside Evanston still proclaim a population of 4,462, that figure has surely doubled since 1975; it will probably top 15,000 by 1985. Everything in Evanston is booming, partly because many roustabouts make $1,000 or more a week. Business is up 20% at J.C. Penney’s, and it would be more than double that if the store had more space. It hopes to move to the new shopping center now being planned, the town’s first. Neon lights blink NO VACANCY outside motels charging $35 a night, cash in advance. “Tourists don’t stand a chance,” says Jennifer Barclay, manager of the Vagabond Motel. Exults Alan Graban, president of the First Wyoming Bank, who has seen his bank’s assets double in five years: “This whole thing is simply fantastic. The town has everything going for it.”

Everything includes a lot of problems. Water and sewage plants are overburdened, so raw sewage is being dumped into the Bear River. Bar brawls, family fights and burglaries have more than doubled the crime rate in the past year. Says Sheriff Leonard Hysell: “We’re desperate for detectives.” With school enrollment up 20% from 1979, most of the $1 million in funds voluntarily contributed by Amoco and Chevron are long gone, mostly for buses and classrooms. Roads torn up by the big rigs need constant repairing, and traffic jams a quarter of a mile long clog downtown streets. “We are suddenly loaded down with a lot of big city problems,” says City Manager Steve Snyder. Adds Mayor Dennis Ottley: “It’s driving us all crazy.”

Housing is probably the town’s most urgent need. An aging, one-story house costs $80,000; there are so few places to rent that a resident who offered to lease his chicken coop for $85 a month promptly found a tenant. The town’s 2,500 trailer spaces are filled, and the waiting list runs into the hundreds. Doug Melton, 26, moved from California several months ago and works as an oilfield laborer, but he and his brother David live in a tepee seven miles out of town. Says Melton: “No way am I going to lay out $ 1,000 a month for a motel room.”

“Not a lot of us love to be here, but this is where the action is,” says Bob Blaylock, 25, a roughneck who makes $1,300 a week installing oil-rigging equipment. “This is Oil City, U.S.A., and you can put up with a lot.”

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