"It's a zoo," said Terry Ayers, who drove into town from Spokane, Wash., slept in his truck, and found a job within hours of arrival, tripling his salary. "It's crazy what's going on out here."

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The reason?

Billions of dollars are coming into the state and thousands of people are following—all because millions of barrels of oil are flowing out.

The result: A good, old-fashioned oil boom.

Here are some examples of what a boom is like in 2011.

There's no available housing, so people sleep in truck stops and Wal-Mart Stores' parking lots.

Developers have expanded plans from just a few dozen new homes and are now building hundreds of houses and thousands of apartment units.

The McDonald's in Williston is one of the busiest in the country, and they need to pay $15 an hour just to attract employees to work there.

And then, there's the trucks—thousands of them—on country roads. There's one left turn in Williston that can get so backed up with truck traffic, it can take hours to get through the intersection.

"If you're not making money now, there's a major problem," said Williston Mayor Ward Koeser, who is overwhelmed with managing the city's growth, from sewage treatment to building permits to an exponential increase in traffic violations.

As for the oil itself, it comes from a rock formation called the Bakken, which spans 14,000 square miles in North Dakota, Montana, and Canada.

The U.S. Geological Survey says there are at least 4 billion barrels of recoverable oil, but other estimates indicate that it could be four to five times that.

"Clearly, it is the largest oil field we've found in North America in the last 40 years," said Bud Brigham, founder and CEO of Brigham Exploration, which has staked the company's future on the Bakken oil business. "If it's more than 15 billion barrels, it may be the biggest oil field found in America ever."

The Bakken has been a known source of oil for decades, but only in recent years has it become feasible—and profitable—to get it out of the ground.

There are two reasons for this: oil prices and drilling technology.

Oil companies, including Brigham Continental Resources, Hess and EOG Resources, drill two miles down and two miles horizontally. Then, they use hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," to create space for oil to flow out of the rock—hundreds of thousands of barrels a day, literally, one drop at a time.

"In a couple of years, the Williston Basin (where the Bakken is located) will surpass the oil production out of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska," said Rick Muncrief, senior vice president at Continental.

Of course, that's as long as prices remain relatively high and fracking is allowed to continue.

"Where we are today, we can generate really solid returns at 65 to 70 dollars a barrel," said Bud Brigham.

As for fracking, it's the process that makes oil extraction possible in the dense rock and shale of the Bakken. Basically, equipment creates thousands of fissures in the rock and then sand, water, and even ceramics are blasted into the rock in order to prop open the fissures to allow oil to flow.

There are chemicals in the "frack water," and there has been some environmental backlash.

So far, it looks like the drilling method is safe from any bans or over-regulation, but if fracking were ever limited or disallowed, the Bakken Boom would go bust.

For now, it is full-speed ahead, and that means hiring will continue at a rapid clip. The trickle down is ubiquitous, and the money is eye-popping.

If you have a license and no criminal record, you can get a six-figure trucking job almost overnight. Real estate construction is almost as frenzied as the oil drilling, and there's even a huge business in housing the workers who don't have housing.

They're called "man camps" in the local parlance, and even though there are some women staying there, it's a lot like most people would think it is.

Trailers lined up in rows with workers either sleeping in simple single rooms, or in some cases, bunking up with others.

Food is in the cafeteria, and companies such as Halliburton and Schlumberger pay an average of $120 per person per night to safely house and feed their workers.

"We have almost 3,000 bedrooms under management, covering over hundreds of miles in the Bakken," said Brian Lash who runs Boston-based Target Logistics, the biggest "man camp" provider in the Bakken. (It likes to think of the camps as "lodges.")

Lash has dealt with booms before, and his actions indicate that the Bakken still has room to grow.

"We've got almost $100 million in buildings and underground infrastructure so far in the Bakken," he said. "We have another three projects that we're about to start."

In Williston, the "man camp" is a better place to be than the Wal-Mart parking lot or the back of a pick-up truck. But most people don't care, as long as the work continues—and the money continues to flow with the oil.

"I have a bed in the back of the camper shell," Terry Ayers said as the sun began to set on the back end of the Wal-Mart parking lot. "You just can't get back there (right now). It's still too hot. You have to wait until the sun drops.

After a little back-and-forth banter, he sums it up: "All for a job."

Natural-gas rigs fell by 6 to 871, the lowest count since June 17, Baker Hughes said. Natural gas for December delivery fell 8 percent, or 28.6 cents, this week to $3.298 per million British thermal units on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 2:05 p.m., according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Crude oil was trading $78.36 higher than the equivalent amount of gas, up from $58.61 a year ago, Bloomberg data shows.

The number of oil rigs fell for the first time in three weeks, by eight to 1,125 this week, Baker Hughes said. Crude-oil for December delivery declined 2 percent, or $1.89, to $97.10 a barrel this week on the Nymex as of 2:08 p.m.

Total U.S. energy rigs slipped for the second week, falling by 15 to 2,001. The rig count has advanced 19 percent in the past year.

Oklahoma lost the most energy rigs this week, down four to 192, the first drop for the state in four weeks. New Mexico’s rig count fell by three to 79, while Alaska, California and Texas each lost two. Colorado and Wyoming each gained a rig.

Rigs on land dropped 15 to 1,945 and rigs in inland waters gained one to 20. The offshore rig count lost one to 36, while rigs in the Gulf of Mexico were unchanged at 36.

Miscellaneous rigs, which primarily drill for geothermal energy, fell by one to five.

Canadian rig counts fell by 13 to 487.

Those descriptions, from reports compiled by state emergency medical services officials, document an exploding demand for services triggered by the influx of people and activity from the oil boom.

Eleven emergency medical services agencies in North Dakota’s six greatest oil-producing counties have reported a 61 percent increase in calls over the past five years — and those are expected to increase by 158 percent by 2014-15.

In the most striking example, the EMS for McKenzie County, based in Watford City, saw its volume double during the past year.

The increase reflects both the population increase and booming oilfield activity as well as the resulting boost in traffic accidents, with a sharp rise in truck accidents.

Trauma cases, from oilfield and traffic accidents, are increasing in frequency and severity, further straining medical centers and ambulance crews.

The increased truck traffic and oil activity require specialized equipment and training that emergency medical crews lack — everything from more sophisticated equipment to extricate accident victims to training in dealing with oil rigs and how to handle mass casualties.

“It’s like being in a war zone,” one unidentified EMS crew member said in a state report on the emergency medical demands in the Oil Patch. “I’m scared one of us is going to be killed.”

Another said, “I was terrified the first time I went up on an oil rig.”

Crime and domestic violence also are increasing, and emergency medical responders can find themselves in personal danger when responding to a call before law enforcement officers arrive.

In Williston, emergency medical crews have requested body armor, said Cody Friesz, administrator of the North Dakota Emergency Medical Service Association.

“They respond to more and more violence, and personal safety is becoming an issue,” he said.

So-called “man camps,” temporary housing complexes for oilfield workers who cannot find conventional housing, can be hard to find, located in remote areas that are not adequately marked by signs, said Tom Nehring, director of the Division of Emergency Medical Services and Trauma for the North Dakota Department of Health.

Also, “when you get in a man camp and you’ve got a thousand people in it, you don’t know where to go.”

In addition to those challenges, unforeseen just a few years ago, emergency medical providers face problems in hiring and attracting staff and finding affordable housing — problems confronting many employers in oil country.

“So we have a whole complex set of issues,” Nehring added. Many of the people who are flocking to the Oil Patch for work arrive destitute, without health insurance, exacerbating the financial squeeze EMS services face, where officials say revenues don’t meet costs.

The problems brought by the added strains to the emergency medical system are compounded because most ambulance crews are staffed by a dwindling base of volunteers — giving rise to what officials have called “a crisis within a crisis.”

“They’ve been primarily volunteers for years and years and years,” said Friesz.

But many of those volunteers are getting older, with no replacements in sight, and case volumes are rising exponentially in many areas of the state’s 17 oil- and gas-producing counties.

That means what emergency medical folks have called the $31 million volunteer subsidy — the estimated value of volunteer in-kind contributions – will dwindle over time, according to a report on the oil impact on out-of-hospital medical services.

“There you have a crisis within a crisis,” Nehring said. “That just puts more pressure on these ambulance services.”

The report on oil impacts for emergency medical services, presented in June, focused on four counties in the heart of the Bakken Formation boom: Dunn, Williams, Mountrail and McKenzie.

But the impacts are spreading to the other counties in the 17-county Oil Patch, as oil and gas development expands to new areas, and figures quickly become outdated, Nehring said.

Recently, the North Dakota Legislature addressed the urgent needs confronting ambulance services, law enforcement and firefighters.

The disaster-relief bill lawmakers passed includes a provision that priority be given to the three public safety categories in allocating money from a $30 million impact aid fund for Oil Patch counties.

That funding stream will help ambulance services, Friesz said, and officials have made it clear they want to help.

“The big question now is, how do you do that?” he added. “But, absolutely, the support is there.”

The needs in oil country are a more intense version of the strains confronting ambulance services across North Dakota, Nehring and Friesz said.

“There is a concern across the entire state,” Friesz said. “This is an industry that needs to consider transitioning to full-time staff, at least in the daytime hours.

“It’s completely stressing the medical industry out there. Hospitals are maxed out and EMS services are running into the same problems,” Friesz said.

Now, thanks to the Eagle Ford shale play, the property tax rolls have jumped to $1.3 billion.

“To think that you would use the b-word in conjunction with Karnes County is just crazy,” Kroll said. “We’re talking in billions and not millions.”

Property tax, sales tax and hotel-motel tax revenues are rising along with oil and gas production across the Eagle Ford shale formation, which sweeps from the Mexican border to East Texas.

But along with the promise of once-in-a-generation oil riches comes overwhelming pressures on communities accustomed to a quiet, rural lifestyle.

Heavy trucks are damaging roads, kicking up dust and creating traffic where traffic never existed. Hotels and rental properties are full to bursting; new RV parks are dotting the landscape. “We have a lot of RV parks coming,” Karnes County Judge Barbara Shaw said. “We’re talking hundreds and hundreds of RV slots.”

So instead of spending à la The Beverly Hillbillies on swimming pools and movie stars, much of the new tax money will go to mundane things, such as roadwork.

Even school district budgets are evolving with the oil play.

In Yoakum, population 5,441, school superintendent Tom Kelley recently discovered his district will be considered rich when a gas processing plant is completed next year in his area. For the first time, Yoakum will be a “Robin Hood” district that must share its wealth with a poorer school one.

“I never, ever dreamed I’d see this in our area,” Kelley said. “It just blows my mind.”

The big boom

Drilling permits in the Eagle Ford have jumped from 26 in 2008 to 2,991 in early November, according to Texas Railroad Commission data, and the new oil and gas production has brought with it more pipelines, processing plants and oil company offices, boosting property values.

Oil field workers flocking into the Eagle Ford contribute to an increase in sales tax and bed tax revenue.

In Dimmit County, sales tax revenue jumped more than 800 percent in four years, from $384,000 in 2008 to more than $3.5 million so far this year.

Sales tax revenue is up 395 percent in Three Rivers since 2008, to $541,000.

Hotel revenue is up more than 650 percent in Dilley since 2008, and rose 309 percent in Cotulla and 229 percent in Beeville.

Overall, local government revenues in the Eagle Ford shale are projected to jump more than ninefold, to $450.6 million in 2020 from $47.6 million in 2010, according to a study by the Center for Community and Business Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Institute for Economic Development.

The shale boom is even spreading to cities not located in the actual oil play.

Oil-field services companies are expanding rapidly in Alice, which also is drawing parts fabricators, creating about 2,000 jobs, said city manager Ray De Los Santos Jr.

In the last fiscal year, Alice budgeted $650,000 in sales tax revenue each month. In every month but one, though, sales tax revenue exceeded $1 million, leading to a budget surplus of $6 million, according to De Los Santos.

The city now plans to build a civic center – and pay cash for it.

And while there are stories aplenty of newly rich landowners making extravagant purchases, local governments don’t appear to be losing their minds over the increased revenue.

City and county officials say they intend to be cautious about spending their newfound riches. Primarily, the money will be used on infrastructure, especially roads.

Brian Schoenemann, the Texas Department of Transportation’s area engineer who’s overseeing roads in several hard-hit Eagle Ford counties – including DeWitt, Gonzales and Lavaca – said people who normally breeze through town to get to work now find themselves sitting through several stoplights or struggling to turn onto a road filled with 18-wheelers.
“In Houston you sit through two lights and have to wait, and it’s expected,” said Schoenemann. “In (DeWitt County), it is a big deal. It is very different than what people are used to. They’re not the sleepy little towns anymore. Now it’s hectic.”

And it’s a struggle to keep up with needed roadwork. On rural roads with no shoulders, for instance, trucks carrying oversize loads sometimes have to veer off the pavement, creating depressions that can become dangerously steep dropoffs.

If it gets too hard to keep up with maintenance, some farm-to-market roads may have to return to gravel, the TxDOT engineer said.

“We may have to re- sort to that,” Schoenemann said. “We’re not there yet.”

DeWitt County Judge Daryl Fowler said his county has a fund dedicated to future road repairs. “We’ve started a savings account. We know this activity will end someday, and we want to be prepared.”

For now, DeWitt County has agreements with two companies that contribute to a road and bridge fund. “If everything holds steady, we’ll add about $2 million to our treasury for road repairs,” Fowler said.

Until bust do we part

Murrell Foster, executive director of the Three Rivers Chamber of Commerce in Live Oak County, said, “With any excess money we have, we plan to primarily use it for repairing and improving our infrastructure. Everything has taken a beating from the heavy trucks.”

John Rightmyer, an attorney who also teaches economics at UTSA, said the historic oil and gas business cycle makes it hard for communities to plan.

“With any sort of boom there will come a bust,” he said. “You don’t want to …build all of these brand-new hotels, and then find in a few years they’ll be empty because Cotulla doesn’t get a lot of visitors.”

The wildly variant production models, which show production lasting anywhere from a few years to 30 years, don’t help much with budgeting.

“Some people still think it’s speculative, and others says it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, and we should drill holes all over,” Rightmyer said. “It falls on who you believe.”

Schoenemann said the state and counties have to do the same sorts of guesswork with road repairs.

“The road system they had for the local traffic was built adequately, but that’s not with all of these large, oversized vehicles going through,” the TxDOT engineer said. “Do they build it to a standard to hold up to these large vehicles, and then in five years, you could have a road that was overbuilt?”

Impact on elderly

It’s hard to forget previous oil busts that left, for instance, many buildings in Houston boarded up in the 1980s, Rightmyer said.

“If they’re old enough to remember it, they have it in the back of their minds,” he said.

Most county and city leaders worry that the Eagle Ford shale boom won’t last as long as oil and gas experts have predicted.

“How long is this money going to come in?” Shaw asked. “We have a lot of problems right now with infrastructure, but how much can we spend on roads?”

Many older Karnes residents have told Shaw, the county judge, that the heavy truck traffic on the county’s roads keeps them from going out as much.

“We need roads now, but will we need them in the future?” she wondered, noting that Karnes went through a mini oil-boom in the early 1980s.

“We were a poor county before,” Shaw said, “and we were still a poor county when they left.”

But for now, the drilling activity has reversed population loss in some South Texas communities.

The latest U.S. Census Bureau data shows Karnes County as a withering community that has lost 4 percent of its population since 2010. But Kroll said the census figures were collected before Houston-based EOG Resources found oil.

“That’s what really made this area explode,” Kroll said.

“If you look at those census numbers it will tell you we’re a shrinking, dying community. All you have to do is drive through the Walmart parking lot and see all of the new Cadillacs. Drive through town and see how many people are redoing their houses.”

Recently, Leno featured a natural-gas fueled hot rod on his show “Jay Leno’s Garage” that can drive more than 600 miles on a single tank of natural gas.

“It is amazing to me that we are into this lithium-ion battery thing, and we have something like 600 years of natural gas right here in the United States,” Leno told the car’s designer J.T. Nesbitt.

Nesbitt, who is from New Orleans, said he was inspired to build the car after hearing Leno say he was a fan of natural gas and didn’t understand why it wasn’t considered sexier than it was.

The car, dubbed the Magnolia Special, was completely hand fabricated and uses a 4.2-liter Jaguar engine that was tweaked to run off natural gas.

After finishing the car, Nesbitt drove the car from New York to Los Angeles to show it off to Leno. The 2-500 mile drive had to be perfectly planned by Nesbitt since there are only a handful of natural gas stations in the U.S. (He ended up sleeping outside of a 24 hour natural gas station until it opened in the morning.)

Production of natural gas and liquids trapped in shale rock is forecast to surge to an average of 1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day by the end of the decade from 250,000 barrels a day this year, J. Michael Yeager, chief executive officer of BHP’s petroleum unit, said on a call with investors today.

“Shale gas is changing the landscape,” Yeager said. “This is going to be a game changer for energy supply across the United States, and for BHP to not be a part of it we think is irresponsible.”

BHP entered the shale gas industry this year with its acquisition of Petrohawk Energy and the $4.75 billion purchase of assets from Chesapeake Energy Corp. Shale may account for almost 50 percent of total U.S. gas production by 2020, the Melbourne-based company said in a presentation today.

The company is betting that gas prices in the U.S., which are less than quarter of those paid by Japanese importers, will rise as producers export liquefied natural gas, Yeager said.

Japan, the world’s biggest buyer of liquefied natural gas, paid about $14.90 per million British thermal units for its LNG supplies in September, data from the country’s Ministry of Finance showed today. Prices at Henry Hub, the U.S. benchmark, were at $3.527 per MMBtu.

‘Prices Will Rise’

“The market expects gas prices will rise over time,” Yeager said.

The mining and energy company expects its petroleum production to surge by 41 percent to 225 million barrels of oil equivalent in the year ending June 2012 from 159.4 million barrels last year, BHP said today.

The company’s oil and gas unit expects an annual growth rate of at least 10 percent for the rest of the decade, and spending on U.S. shale to rise to about $6.5 billion in the financial year ending June 2020 from around $4.5 billion this year, BHP said.

The Petrohawk acquisition makes BHP the seventh-biggest independent oil and gas company by resources, the company said today. The petroleum producer committed earlier this year to spend $80 billion on growth projects by 2015.

Chief Executive Officer Marius Kloppers has had three deals totaling more than $100 billion aborted or rejected over the past four years, including hostile bids for Rio Tinto Group and Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc.

BHP, also the world’s largest mining company, would consider expansion in LNG, Kloppers said in August. BHP, a partner in Woodside Petroleum Ltd.’s proposed Browse LNG venture in Western Australia, aims to have “many tools in the toolkit,” he said.

BHP’s oil and gas sales climbed 22 percent to $10.74 billion in the year that ended June 30.

“This area has a lot of similar characteristics to the Bakken in eastern Montana — it’s like a baby brother,” Primary Petroleum president Mike Marrandino told the Independent Record for a story published Sunday. “It’s shallower, so it’s more accessible and you don’t have to compete with rigs in the western basin like in eastern Montana, so your costs are less.”

Three companies have either drilled or received permits to drill 37 exploration wells on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Glacier County since 2009. In the past year, at least 14 companies or individuals have spent millions of dollars to lease hundreds of parcels in Glacier, Teton, Toole, Pondera, Cascade and Lewis and Clark counties.

Marrandino said his company has been interested in exploration along the Front since about 2005, but three test wells drilled in 2009 and released in February 2010 that is spurring the latest land rush on oil leases.

The results estimated there were 13 million to 15 million barrels of recoverable oil per square mile, Marrandino said.

While oil leases in the Bakken formation in Canada and eastern North Dakota were selling for nearly $3,000 an acre, and few were available, leases along the Front ranged from $1.50 to $390 per acre.

Jim Jensen, executive director of the Montana Environmental Information Center, noted that many people believed the Front — an area rich in wildlife — was put off-limits to oil and gas exploration when leases on federal lands were bought over the past five years. However, state and private property still can be leased and developed.

Better technology that allows horizontal drilling is making exploration and development more feasible on the Front, since most state and federal lands don’t allow surface occupancy. Instead, companies can purchase leases and set up rigs on private land, go down a few thousand feet and then drill horizontally under the public lands.

John Grassy, a spokesman for the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, said oil companies aren’t just showing an interest on the Rocky Mountain Front. He noted that Hill, Liberty and Chouteau counties in north-central Montana also are seeing increased drilling activity.

“Oil companies are always out there doing testing and speculation; it’s a huge part of what they do,” Grassy said. “We’re also hearing that the Bakken may be accessible from points further west than previously known, so that’s fueling some of the exploration.”

The revenues from the state leases, along with any royalties, are used to fund education.

Officials in Glacier National Park are concerned about drilling along the Front and how it might impact bull trout and grizzly bear habitat near the park, as well as the impact on the scenery if many wells are drilled.

DNRC Director Mary Sexton said the state prohibits surface occupation on state lands without special approval or an environmental impact statement being created when there is more than one drill pad per square mile.

Stoney Burk, a Choteau attorney, is a bit skeptical about whether the latest oil rush will pan out. He notes that land packages oil companies put together can be re-leased to another company at a higher rate and that companies might be touting the Front as part of the Bakken formation when it might not be true.

“There’s a lot of wheelers and dealers in the industry, and it serves them well as a middle man to hype up an area,” Burk said.

HELENA, Mont. — Speculation that the oil-rich Bakken shale formation may extend as far west as the Rocky Mountain Front is sparking increased leasing of land along the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains and in north-central Montana.