A trip to an oil boomtown transformed by thousands of young men arriving to find work: 

I’d heard Williston was a magical place. A small town where the recession didn’t exist, where you could make six figures driving a truck, and where oil bubbles straight up from the Earth’s Bakken layer like water from an elementary school fountain. Or at least that’s what I saw on the news.

Men came to Williston, worked hard, and saved their homes from foreclosure back in Texas, Florida, or Oklahoma. The women stayed home with the kids – there just wasn’t enough housing for the little ones. So mostly just manly men doing manly things. It all sounded so masculine.

And it was all because of the North Dakota crude coming out of the frozen ground at a rate of a half-million barrels a day. In 2010, for the first time in 13 years, the United States imported less than half its oil from foreign countries, and that’s largely because of extraction in the Williston Basin, an area that stretches from west North Dakota to eastern Montana and up north to Saskatchewan. Little ol’ Williston – preboom population 12,000 – had become the rump capital of an oil country.

“Greetings from Williston, North Dakota.” — Stephen Rodrick, Men’s Journal

More from Men’s Journal

First in a series on John Bolenbaugh, an oil cleanup worker who said he was fired for refusing to cover up oil from a spill that put millions of gallons of tar sands crude into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. Complicating matters is his personality and his own criminal record:

Armed with a digital camera and a machine-gun delivery of baiting, rhetorical questions, usually directed at cleanup workers (‘What do you think of Enbridge covering up oil? Who do you think should pay for killing our fish and poisoning our river?’), Bolenbaugh’s caustic style has made him a divisive figure among locals — a selfless hero to some, a self-aggrandizing crusader to others. Enbridge claims that Bolenbaugh has had no effect on its cleanup efforts, but his picture (square-jawed with wild blue eyes and wearing an orange vest) hung for months inside the security box at the entrance to the Enbridge staging site under the heading: ‘All Personnel Be Alert.’

Even after countless conversations, I sometimes find it hard to tell whether Bolenbaugh is a legitimate whistleblower who refuses to look the other way or, as his critics deride him, a wack-job whose motor-mouth finally got him fired.

“The Whistleblower (Part 1).” — Ted Genoways, OnEarth

See also: “Drilled, Baby, Drilled.” — Alan Prendergast, Westword, Jan. 20, 2012

The long road to reform the government’s Minerals Management Service, three years after its “sex, drugs and oil” scandal:

One thing that the agency hasn’t done is put to rest the skepticism of its whistleblowers. They claim that schemes similar to the royalty-avoidance techniques at issue in the False Claim Act lawsuits are still being used by major oil companies in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in tens of millions in lost revenues.

“I don’t think a lot has changed,” says Little. “Shell isn’t the only company doing this. We turned in several other companies to the inspector general. We gave them our files. We had to force them to take them. And they still have not done one thing. They have not pursued any of those companies.”

“Drilled, Baby, Drilled.” — Alan Prendergast, Westword

See also: “The Fracturing of Pennsylvania.” Eliza Griswold, The New York Times, Nov. 17, 2011