One of our regular contributors told us of a recent family trip out of state. They stopped to stay the night in a small town but hotel after hotel had no rooms available. When they finally found one with an opening, the clerk told them, "Get your family, get back in your car and get on the highway. Drive to the next town and stay there. They don't call these boys, "Oil Field Trash" for nothing..."
Now we aren't painting all the industry with the same brush, but when a hotel passes on revenue for a night, something's up. Sounds like the crime rate.
Make note in the article of the difference in what happens in Texas.
In a modern-day echo of the raucous Old West, small towns enjoying a boom in oil and gas drilling are seeing a sharp increase in drunken driving, bar fights and other hell-raising, blamed largely on an influx of young men who find themselves with lots of money in their pockets and nothing to do after they get off work.
Authorities in Pennsylvania and other states are quick to point out that the vast majority of workers streaming in are law-abiding. But they also say the drilling industry has brought with it a hard-working, hard-drinking, rough-and-tumble element that, in some places, threatens to overwhelm law enforcement.
But he said that many in the industry obey the law and that authorities in Pennsylvania have less tolerance for troublemakers than police in small-town Texas, where rig workers are used to raising hell and getting a pass from law enforcement.
"You can do that [stuff] and get away with it," Bourque said. In Pennsylvania, "they look at it totally different."
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