Inside the Bakken: Film sets out to tell the story of oil development on Fort Berthold Reservation
BY TERRI HANSEN
Time was when traffic in North Dakota’s portion of the Bakken oil field was a rare vehicle crossing an expansive horizon on a tiny roadway.
The roadways are still tiny, but traffic has increased monumentally on the Bakken geologic formation, the largest contiguous oil field discovery in U.S. history, says the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
It has also brought a huge increase in traffic accidents, while services at the tiny hospital are limited. The industrialization and population boom has strained water supplies, sewage systems, and federal, state and tribal governmental services in the area, as NPR has reported. Exponentially increased amounts of dust drift across deteriorating roadways. Jobs are plentiful and high paying, but there’s housing shortage, and most of what’s there is makeshift. The once quiet one-bar town of Williston has had an influx of prostitutes, while a thinly stretched police force must now regularly quell once nonexistent bar fights, according to the documentary Faces of the Oil Patch.
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