Life has changed quickly for the small towns at the center of the shale oil boom. The thousands of temporary workers streaming into areas of Texas that don’t have enough housing or hotel space have been living in “man camps,” rows upon rows of prefabricated houses built specifically to house the roughnecks.
In its special report, “The Shale Life,” The Texas Tribune profiled some of these workers and their lives inside the camps. Listen to some of their stories here.
In September, the University of Texas at San Antonio released the first report to try to tally the total number of man camps in the Eagle Ford shale; the university counted 320 RV parks and camps with 7,600 units. The city of Three Rivers, which had a population of less than 1,600 in 2009, had 50 of those camps. The largest camp in North Dakota, which is experiencing its own unprecendented population boom because of oil, could house over 1,200 people.
True to their name, the camps rarely have women or children.
“Occasionally we would get a husband and wife, or sometimes a father and son,” the general manager of one North Dakota camp said in an interview with Bloomberg. “Doesn’t happen that often.”
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