Contents

Engineering a Boom

The Second Boom Arrives

With a Vengeance

In a significant change from the earlier rush, where the government had encouraged prospectors with only its own official optimism, this time around the federal government had deliberately engineered a corporate mining boom on the Western Slope through legislation and subsidies.

These two distinct approaches produced markedly different impacts on local economic and social arrangements. The relatively small amount of capital investment and its diffusion through numerous small companies in the first boom did not create any boomtowns among the communities of Shale Country, but the second boom was characterized by rapid economic and population growth that engulfed existing communities, creating wholesale disruption that lasted long after the boom ceased.¹⁹

Boomtime Frenzy

As they watched their communities change with the rapid influx of capital and the newcomers it brought, residents of the Western Slope found that a rapid boom can create nearly as much pain and turmoil as a sudden bust.

People from around the nation made the trek to Western Colorado to find work and high boomtime wages. Even if they did not find work at the mines, they could still cash in by building roads, constructing new housing, upgrading old wooden city water lines to handle increased flows, serving meals at suddenly crowded restaurants, and otherwise providing the many requirements that came with transforming small rural towns into a new urban frontier created by oil shale development.²⁰ Those who did find jobs often did not find housing right away, and semipermanent campgrounds sprung up in and around every town within driving distance of the oil shale fields.

Turnover among workers was frequent. Because construction occurred in phases, the workforce was in constant flux as groups of skilled tradesmen cycled through according to the needs of the projects. Coping with a drastic population increase is difficult enough for the communities caught up in a boom - constantly managing and serving this enormous ebb and flow of transient workers and their families can be overwhelming. Elected officials, longtime locals, and newcomers alike struggled to contend with housing shortages, strained social services, rising crime, overtaxed sanitation systems, insufficient water supplies, pollution, traffic congestion, and noise.²¹

Gillette Syndrome

As the small communities caught up in the boom - particularly Parachute (preboom population 300), Rifle (2200), Silt (900), and New Castle (700) - worked to keep from being overwhelmed, they were well supplied with examples of the stakes they faced. The most potent of these examples came from Gillette, a small ranching town on Interstate 90 in Wyoming's Powder River Basin that sits atop a massive coal seam. Gillette's boom had started a few years before the oil shale leases were issued, and by 1974 sociologists who studied the town felt they were documenting a public health disaster. "Gillette Syndrome" soon became shorthand for the dark side of energy development.

Researchers identified sharply increased rates of drinking, divorce, delinquency, and depression - dubbed the Four Ds - as the once agrarian town's population quadrupled from 3000 to 17,000. Although more recent studies have questioned the data supporting these findings, and Gillette today is a community of 40,000 working to transcend its bad rap, the term Gillette Syndrome became a frightening watchword for communities confronting an energy boom. ²²

Exxon's Colony Project

In May 1980, just before Carter signed the Energy Security Act, the stakes on the Western Slope grew even higher when Exxon, the largest company in the world, announced that it had paid $400 million to buy out Atlantic Richfield Company (Arco) and partner with The Oil Shale Company (Tosco) to develop the Colony Oil Shale Project on a 22-square-mile parcel up Parachute Creek. Chevron, Unocal, Mobil, Tennaco, Occidental, and other major energy companies were already developing projects in Shale Country, but Exxon planned to outdo them all. In a now infamous "white paper," Exxon officials outlined a grand $5 billion vision that proposed digging up to 6 of the world's largest open pit mines, rerouting water from the Missouri River Basin for shale processing, and ultimately producing 8 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. To accommodate the 22,000 workers Exxon estimated would be required for this extreme scenario, the company planned to build an entirely new town on Battlement Mesa, across the Colorado River from Parachute, with a projected population of 25,000.²³

The commitment of the world's largest company to oil shale, and the mind-boggling scale of its plans, persuaded even the most skeptical residents of the Western Slope that this time the boom was real. One longstanding local summarized the conflicted feelings many residents had about the new boom, explaining that although oil shale was "badly needed by the nation" and he was patriotically willing to do his part, "I have mixed emotions about what'll happen to the countryside, and you know they'll tear up the mountains and add pollution, but on the other hand we need the economic stimulus of industry."²⁴

Economic stimulus proved to be a mild term for the ways in which Exxon's arrival on the Western Slope pushed the boomtime frenzy to new levels. The populations of existing towns mushroomed: Parachute grew from 300 in 1979 to 1200 in 1982 and projections topped out around 15,000. In Rifle, home to 2200 residents before the boom, "modest" projections by the city (geared to a smaller industry than was outlined in the Exxon white paper's extreme scenario) called for 700 new police and firemen with 140 vehicles, 200 new doctors, and 75,000 new homes within a decade.

Wages and property values soared with the insatiable demand for labor and housing. Carpenters who might have been unemployed or working a minimum wage job ($3.10 in 1980) to make ends meet in Oregon or Ohio earned $16 per hour in Western Colorado, and heavy equipment operators commanded more than $20 per hour, plus per diem travel expenses. In Rifle, the total value of building permits went from a half-million dollars in 1976 to $14 million by 1980. In Grand Junction, the largest city and regional center of the Western Slope, city leaders built a new airport to handle the upsurge in business traffic, a new shopping mall, and 5 new schools to keep pace with the growing population. The establishment of a large-scale oil shale industry seemed so certain that the industry magazine Shale Country began publication again. ²⁵