They’re independents, innovators, young, and heeding an entrepreneurial urge: ‘If you have any ambition at all, move to North Dakota … the sky’s the limit.’
WILLISTON, N.D.—Josef McConnell, a tennis coach from Southern California, had been unemployed for a year after the government response to the pandemic destroyed his business. Then, in 2021, a friend told him that there were good-paying jobs to be had in North Dakota’s Bakken oilfield.
He knew nothing of oilfields, never heard of the Bakken Basin, nor, for that matter, could he say much about North Dakota other than he believed the state to be a cold, flat flyover tundra with corn and cows somewhere near Canada that had previously been “100 percent not on my mind.”
Nevertheless, Mr. McConnell said, “I picked up everything and left. It was do-or-die.”
He quickly secured a job laboring at SandPro, a sand, wellhead, and automation management start-up in Berthold, west of Minot. As promised, good-paying jobs were available. As promised, they were muscle jobs, dirty jobs, and long-shift jobs.
He was “cleaning iron, tearing things apart,” disassembling and rebuilding “frack trees’ that cap fracked—hydraulically fractured—oil wells. It was hard, gritty work, 12 hours a day, for weeks at a time in an industrial beehive down the road and across the highway from downtown Berthold, a towering grain elevator looming as its landmark above bald grassy ridges and cottonwood-framed creek beds.
But the money was fantastic and, it dawned on him that “this could be a career, not just a job,” Mr. McConnell said.
“I told myself that if I couldn’t make it through the first winter, this is not for me. I survived. It sucked, but I survived,” he said. “From there on, I tried to learn everything I could. I wanted to know how it worked, what it did. I cross-trained into all the aspects of the business.”
As SandPro grew, Mr. McConnell, 33, was appointed night-shift supervisor. Last December, he ascended to shop manager. In August, he became a homeowner. “I’d never be able to do that in California,” he said.
By John Haughey
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