Best Read All Weekend? The New York Times Travel Section Features North Dakota; Also, Best Method For Tracking Population In Boom / Bust Micro-Metro Areas -- August 7, 2015

Absolutely excellent. A must-read for anyone interested in northwest North Dakota. Really, really good. A huge "thank you" to a reader for sending this link to me. "In North Dakota, Boom, Bust, and Oil. North Dakota’s northwest region, which has seen Native Americans, Lewis and Clark and settlers come and go, is home to the state’s latest oil boom."

These remnants of earlier booms look almost quaint. The city of Williston, the unofficial capital of the current boom, has grown in the past decade from about 12,000 residents to as many as 60,000, and some predict it will hit 100,000 before too long.

Developers have built sprawling neighborhoods where everything — apartments, townhouses, free-standing houses, maybe thousands of units in all — is rented by oil companies. A stylish new apartment complex several miles east of town, surrounded by absolutely nothing, harks back to a mid-1880s photo of a towering apartment house at 72nd Street and Central Park West, a location then so remote that the edifice was named the Dakota.

  

The open plains are dotted with modular “man camps”: The shabbier ones are haphazard collections of RVs, trailers and cabins; the nicer ones look like mobile home parks with scores of units, perfectly aligned and identical down to the placement and angle of their satellite dishes. The largest resemble military bases.

The roads, flat and endlessly straight, can be a pleasure to drive, as long as all the newly rendered potholes have been patched adequately. Traffic is a function of the price of oil; above $80 or $90 per barrel, and it could start to look displeasingly metropolitan. At $50-something, though, as it was when I last visited, you can cruise and pass at leisure as you seek out that giant gravel pit you overheard someone talking about in your hotel’s breakfast room, or that cluster of 250,000-barrel oil tanks across the way from a towering old grain elevator, a scene that in the gloaming brings to mind King Kong squaring off against Godzilla.

All of it — flares, derricks, pumps, King Kong — is surrounded by wheat. Occasionally you will spot a pond with water as blue-black as the North Atlantic; but mostly there’s wheat. Miles of it. And somehow, it keeps the petroleum works in check, even makes them look clean. Some of that, to be sure, is the fact that they are new, but these are also not the dusty, grimy oil fields of West Texas or the San Joaquin Valley, at least not yet. In the right frame of mind, you might even find something romantic in the sight of a pair of bobbing pump jacks silhouetted against the setting sun.

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Best Method For Tracking Population In Boom / Bust Micro-Metro Areas

At first glance, one wonders if this is being reported tongue-in-cheek. But the method for tracking population in a boom / bust micro-metro area in the US seems to be fairly accurate. Reuters is reporting this story out of Williston:

The population of a U.S. oil boomtown that became a symbol of the fracking revolution is dropping fast because of the collapse in crude oil prices, according to an unusual metric: the amount of sewage produced.  

Williston, North Dakota, has seen its population drop about 6 percent since last summer, according to wastewater data relied upon heavily by city planning officials.

They turned to measuring effluent because it was a much faster and more accurate way to track population than alternatives such as construction permits, school enrollment, tax receipts or airport boardings. 

Local officials now estimate the population by dividing daily effluent flow by 75, the number of gallons of wastewater each resident is estimated to produce each day. Weather and construction can affect the flows.

When figuring out how large to make a sewage treatment plant, engineers have long multiplied the number of residents by the 75 gallon rule of thumb. Williston simply inverts this formula, a method academics have touted for its accuracy in measuring population.