while the two thousand any financial crash drives america into recession and unemployment willis and a small town in north dakota experiences a genuine black gold rush. thanks to a drug fracking to case or oil is discovered in this tiny town in fact it turns out that williston is sitting atop one of the largest shale oil fields in the nation company's rest tracepoint this new energy resource period thirty two miles below the or surface oil soon flows freely and news spreads the wildfire for the ones left behind by the crisis of two thousand and eight relisted seems like their last chance for human life with an unemployment rate of zero percent and wages it three or four times more than the national average the promise of prosperity and desperate times is too great to ignore cheered by a common hope thousands of men and women throw themselves once again into a desperate rush towards the mythical american tree and at any cost. history

repeats itself in the midst of this new boom no doubt the most impressive in u.s. history. they need there's more work out here than they got able to do it. don't believe. i still believe there's a dream i want you to get you still mostly. just like gold rush is very very similar to a gold rush. father is fresh out of cincinnati in two thousand and twelve after being unemployed for months he hears about the boom happening in williston. i think.

at first he works for an oil company but soon his desire for independence takes over and he sets up his own service company. bought the company and we had a sweeper truck and the situation and went from a manageable situation where i get like some sleep at night and i could like keep up with like daily activities like taking showers every day like an all out sprint trying to like keep up with so much work it was amazing go from one job to the next to the next to the next to the next as it is now i have not right now i have not taken a full day off in over nine months and i'm very thankful i'm here i'm not complaining one bit very thankful for the money an opportunity it was like someone who had been starving for years for like money like all of a sudden there's like. all you can eat. buffet and all you have to do is go out there and get the work done and people give you money to do it was amazing this

year i'm probably going to be making around two hundred fifty thousand dollars is a lot of work involved a lot of work it's twenty four hours a day seven days a week. well i guess i should get back to work. here in an inhospitable they're full of contrasts before the willison was a small conservative agricultural town and in many ways this aspect seems untouched everything has its own place including emptiness and silence the streets are practically deserted it's a town that is motionless within his history of the past. then you have another town the one that needs to welcome this new wave of residence oil company settling down a large numbers of extracting at least a million barrels a day. this is the one we unpacked like a raft gift. without so boring. up with

a kind of uniformity copy and paste prefabricated never cost the. investors are right in that everything based upon a population that should be multiplied by for. the first came up here in the spring of two thousand ford saying i work there are neighbors they did a hydraulic fracturing and i was looking at how much it was going to cost me to stay somewhere you know if i was just going to stand a whole tale it was like a hundred dollars and i was in it ok hundred dollars a day seven days a week that's seven hundred dollars a course of a whole week and so i just came to the conclusion you know what i'll give me a van fix it up so that you know i can be comfortable in it it makes financial sense because i get to keep the majority of my money versus just just on the way on housing and stuff like this. is my first and then. get worse. and that's because the. jury cannot

survive very long in his van where winter temperatures sometimes drop of the minus twenty. for the time being nothing is ready everything has happened so quickly it's very hard to find a place to. makeshift housing known as man camps mine up by the hundreds on the edge of town or close to drilling sites. these dormitory towns built by necessity an empty lots of her research we one hundred and one hundred fifty dollars a night two meals including. two thousand and twelve the population living in these men camps was estimated to be over ten thousand you have guys from and now to florida nevada. you name it i've seen the license plate. every week you know this is the best thing for single men you know i mean that's what i mean as far as wade. is. a challenge to the everything

you know the whole country should be this way. because. this place will put like a stress on you it will put a weight they should be carrying around on you and you are really realizing and when i went home i came back i noticed that weight pressure that whatever you want to call it it builds up over time for me and. you wouldn't come up here unless there's some reason for you to come up here you know nobody was moving up here into the in two thousand and one i was moving up here in two thousand and one or two thousand and two it wasn't until ok i can gain something financially i can i can improve my situation i can better my status my situation or on the level that i met

in life now and that's that's what the whole fill up here really brought to a lot of people who were smart about it and save their money. because i'm tell you man i was asking a lot of pressure. there's not much help here to do to keep you busy focused on something you know you know keep your time occupied you know is really allowed me to save all of my money and i'm in a position where you know i can go back home and buy your house. i just like the sound of it i can go back home and buy me a house a cash for a house not a car not a car but a house. a literalist in the least footprints on the landscape the fast as it leaves a kind of retreat by these forces for as as far. and i can see sweeney slowly to

extract the by calls from the subtree interrupts. it became urgent to build four lane highways all around town in order to accommodate the lines of trucks transporting all kinds of pipes beams sand and water used in fracking. nothing was planted events everything was done in a hurry because of the immediacy of the work and the enormous influx of workers investors and the unemployed rushed in chasing their dream to grab a piece of the pie. german guy an austrian guy italian an american and my rifles just in case i need to kill someone. most americans have guns in their house. and at the foot of my bed is a bible. most of my adult life was spent in universities doing

teaching or research i went to the university of maine and got several degrees there in agricultural engineering information systems then i worked for mit on the human genome project. there came a time when there was a recession there was high unemployment i spent a lot of time reading the news on the internet and i kept reading about the williston the oil boom the bokken shale. i wasn't doing anything i was going into debt so i decided to go from an area that had almost ten percent unemployment to an area that had less than one percent unemployment. i came looking for work but i didn't know what kind of work to take. so i fell into wireline it was very difficult at the beginning i had. accidents while pulling a trailer i could have been killed there were explosives in the trailer and it spun three hundred sixty degrees and the explosives came out the back. but my boss

didn't fire me they gave me another chance after the first year i was very playable i had a marketable skill. it pleases me that i had a hand a small hand but nevertheless i changed my career late in life and involved myself in american energy independence and in weaning this country of our foreign oil dependency. america would sell its own mother for energy. i live in st george utah. and my family's down there i need to come up here to make some money to pay off debt and stuff we're getting there.

i went to school and became a teach school elementary school i could make twenty five thousand dollars as a teacher or i could make fifty thousand dollars a year and drive a truck so i chose to drive truck. and i were usually twelve to fourteen hours to get my truck around eight o'clock in the morning and i were till eight o'clock at night you know somewhere between me and night. it's mentally. not only my physically fit. but it's a mental fatigue. this

is the moment that i like the best. reached down enough to be everything stops vibrating all the noise goes away. i live in company housing here it's provided by the company i have to share. thirty five foot r.v. trailer with a three hundred fifty pound guy. you guessed. it.

three mr. trump has been coming up with a lot of statements seem to be states of the gulf should take care of the middle east or other we're still committed to the middle east so there's there's a lot of incoherence there but i think saudi arabia is hugely important to the united states and i think trump understands that and this is this is exactly what was driving his kind of commentary on the. killing i think that's at the end of the day it's not going to change the status quo of america's policies of hugo. while give easy val's find this.

and. rational and. desirable of the. people in the zuma. origin in the beginning to your. fortune for the outnumbered a lot of. more than a financial. running

around trying to find a job and work here or there and it's not a good life. my children have had some some problems so i spent a lot of money helping my children and cumulated debt so. the original plan was to come up here for six months and get out of debt but as i came up i made money paid off some bills there were other things. i happy birthday celestial. six six stitches yes.

well i'm glad you're feeling better celestial i mean. i love you too and talk to you in the morning. already of you. i usually park the truck come back to the trailer here get a frozen meal throw it in microwave sit down to need it and. if we're not too tired. my roommate and i'll have a bowl of ice cream and and watch part of a d.v.d. on the laptop. but most of the time it and go to sleep i don't take a shower every night because we don't have a shower well there's a shower in the. trailer but there's no running water. it's not

a. done deal see. this boom has not solely attracted oil workers. it was an opportunity for people like jeff and constance to change their lives to open a small business. before i moved to austin i was in the health care industry and then a hospital administrator for several years in kansas. my project was going to live and i wanted to be with my family first and i remember talking to some people it was talking about wilson and about north dakota. there's a lot of oil out here and there's a lot of jobs lot of opportunity for business bulletin seemed to have the best opportunities for us and my family and so we drove up to the local and we realized immediately there was a huge opportunity out here so many people out here there must have been at least

thirty thousand people going through here and there were only five restaurants at the time and then we looked a little bit closer and said ok what skill sets do we have that would be a good fit for us and we thought that maybe if you don't show up with work so many other businesses have done here and the old timers they all think that foreigners coming here to take their money of them go back home they don't think we're like and i think that's one of the reasons we're that's it's not just a business for as we are part of the community if you were embraced by the community they supported us they definitely did to help the south. we are part of it and we're always contributed. to be a good fit a. lot of kids are going to be really. i didn't have no it's. we came here they didn't have

a donut shop they hadn't had one for over eight years most of these kids never had a girlfriend or. they come into my shop all these high school boys long as well go go nuts. there are more families that are coming to my list and now i go pick up the land and school and you see i think it's you know one of the aging kids african hispanic you know it's a good sign that the community is growing. how seaway you know. create lives in bozeman montana a small town six hundred miles away. has run out of options in his hometown and has decided to set up for it with liston he knows he will not see his wife and two kids for several weeks. and then we'll with the hope that he will find work when he

arrives when i leave my family like this i usually feel you know pretty lousy at times there was one incident years ago where my daughter was just in tears as i was leaving and it's like it's hard it's it's not fun it's hard but it's what has to be done. they're getting better at it they're getting used to it i'm getting used to it but i still like a brother be home. training is the way he is usually go get me anywhere from about four weeks to this last level is eight weeks really. we'll see him for about eight weeks and then hokum home for about a week or so i think it's been hardest for the kids because. they were told me that they feel like it's a broken home you know it's almost like we're divorced because we see so. a little of each other so it's just been really hard for them this is very similar to living

on a ship or being on a boat you're gone for months and see you come back and you see the family for a short period of time and then take off on your ship again you're it's a great analogy it's exactly where it's like. we've all talked about this and i think we could do with a little less so that he could spend more time with us and be more of a family. so i think i would rather have that happy family over here some of the stuff that we transfer died for us that watching my kids grow up it's difficult until it's almost five years now there's no doubt about it but it's just it's what we have to do. adam had just lost his job in the oil business when he met jeff and constance the

couple was charged by the courage of a low power this young man ready to do anything to save his family from misery. since then out of spends all his nights eating donuts. and doing three jobs right now working every day. trying to get some money i want to relocate my family oh. i got two girls two daughters i want something better form where we lived in southern california is not a very nice place to live so it's a lot of crime. gangsters and so the north dakota a be a better place to raise a family. is a lot of resources here and you've got the salvation army and they feed you here the methodist church over it lutheran church down there. but i get food from work too at the donuts trying to send all my money home for my wife to

pay the bills and rent it's enough to get by you know just a the red you know a one hundred a week or a guy me understand i have a family he wanted to say one hundred twenty five but he's dropped it down to a hundred a week. the american dream is that you can always chase i really believe that even during the recession there were still opportunities for each is going to look for you got to be overwhelming or move to change that to get going and go go do it. now a lot of people don't do that but the ones they do with usually come out ahead wrong. because our country's never is stable across the whole it's very rare to have all fifty states doing well it's also rare to have all fifty states to poorly so we're always moving around that's part of our national character it's always find new opportunities wherever they may be.

what i do here pretty much is remodeling homes and handyman work fixing other people's mistakes and other people's problems mostly for homeowners residential it keeps me real busy. i bill out usually about sixty hours a week i can easily put in a twelve hour day no promise you have to run you know my go to bank post office go see clients check on supplies orders stuff a lot of running around to do i love to work how i am a workaholic there's no doubt about it the money's nice but i like to work just the way my family is. these are some of the old cattle pens in corrals here some of the fallen apart completely but this is where they bring in the cattle to brando and have the calves i have the vets work on them and stuff but now i can see it i don't use it anymore

. it was kind of a tough life i mean you lose cattle they die and the winners and so on the hot summers and you know drought is just on i was going to happen gamble every year they never made a lot of money doing it most or ranchers and farmers but they really don't have to do that anymore because they've got the palms down there that they can make money off of. and the oil's put a lot a lot of money into their pockets and now they can do what they want you know take it easy work whatever they want to do so it's not as risky life's not as risky as you used to be.

that or. you don't meet many people that are from. when i'm talking to a bunch of people i don't know and they say we're you from i say here and they go what. most people have lived here then they were dismayed to see this many people coming lot of people made a lot of money so i mean they like that the older folks that lived here on a fixed income renting an apartment they went from three hundred a month two thousand a month and rent so they're gone. i remember the first time i drove out to employees and i was eighteen miles about and i counted fifty or oil rigs that i could see from the road and that's when i started getting crazy i thought you know the oil companies for the most part they're good until we start thinking that they can power right over here because they're big and powerful

. one thing they do do and i asked them when they came out the first time they always send a woman along with the group to comes out and i asked him straight out i said is that because we will shoot a woman. so. we never walk the house now or go take the key out. all the time my pickup we walk in the house with no alarm system in the house would change just about everything. to get my meal. hour yet more and more neighbors. it's not the country anymore like it used to be a. lot of these are people who moved in with the oil. there was no place to buy in town they bought lots over here probably three four acres watch and build out here

. six guys or financial survival. when customers go buy your supplies. in elf well reduces our. that's undercutting not what's good for market it's not good for the global economy. rather just go with the flow to the best out of the delicious. to the concepts most pain to perform i actually prepare myself to die. he'd want to say to us when asked and he. has most of. the snow in homo stuff how do you. know.

i'm not. discounting was. good so don't seem. so we'll see if. there was any good with us there was just that yes get more deep mission. so i took it to education they. call it b.s. . this is says harlan kentucky. boys it was very funny. a ko money since it was almost no coal mines left. the jobs are gone all the coal

miners of said. that it was love to see these people the survivors of disappearing before their eyes. i remember thinking when i was younger that if anything ever happened to the coal mines here that it would become a ghost town but i never thought in a million years i would see that and it's how it's happened. the headlines the leaders of russia turkey germany out of fronts meet to lay the groundwork for peace in syria and serious differences were made of the house to topple extremist groups in the northwest of the war torn country if radical militants oppose this if they make probations from inside the it live zone but russia will reserve the right to help the syrian government should eliminate this threat of a military offensive by.