Post by Logan on Feb 19, 2016 13:11:32 GMT -6
When the oil boom was churning in remote expanses of Montana and North Dakota, Andy Turco left college in Illinois to take a chance on finding backbreaking, dangerous and high-paying work on the Great Plains.
He landed in Williston, N.D., where he lived in a car in a Wal-Mart parking lot for weeks, eventually getting hired as an oil roughneck. Turco worked 90 hours a week, earning nearly six figures, and said it was the best thing he'd done in his life.
"I'm finally living an adult lifestyle," Turco, then 24, said in March 2013, "instead of a teenage dropout lifestyle."
But the floor dropped out from under Turco in the middle of 2014, when an oil glut led to a plunge in gas prices that delighted drivers but indirectly put an estimated 250,000 global oil and gas employees out of work, including Turco. He returned home to the Midwest and self-destructed.
Read more: www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-oil-fracking-boom-bust-met-20160218-story.html
He landed in Williston, N.D., where he lived in a car in a Wal-Mart parking lot for weeks, eventually getting hired as an oil roughneck. Turco worked 90 hours a week, earning nearly six figures, and said it was the best thing he'd done in his life.
"I'm finally living an adult lifestyle," Turco, then 24, said in March 2013, "instead of a teenage dropout lifestyle."
But the floor dropped out from under Turco in the middle of 2014, when an oil glut led to a plunge in gas prices that delighted drivers but indirectly put an estimated 250,000 global oil and gas employees out of work, including Turco. He returned home to the Midwest and self-destructed.
Read more: www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-oil-fracking-boom-bust-met-20160218-story.html