Carol and Steve LaFramboise stand behind the bar at The B.A.R. in New England on Feb. 9. The owner of The B.A. bowling alley and restaurant, Steve partnered with Randy Schwartz and several volunteers to open the new business in the town’s old lumber yard building.
NEW ENGLAND — Steve LaFramboise had a nice little thing going inside his bowling alley. He had turned a small corner section of The B.A. restaurant into a bar and lounge area where bowlers could gather.
It turned into the place to go in New England for those wanting to socialize while enjoying an adult beverage.
But, LaFramboise said, it was never anything more than a hole in the wall. In fact, he acknowledges, it wasn’t even much of a bar.
Like many people in southwest North Dakota, I’m a Lutheran who is friends with a lot of Catholics.
For me, it goes back to high school when I met a handful of Trinity kids and found that, despite what us small-towners had heard, they weren’t the arrogant “big city” kids some thought they were. A few of those guys have become lifelong friends and, through them, I’ve met many other great friends and people along the way.
One of those guys woke me up Monday with a text message while I was laying in a hotel bed on vacation. He asked if I had heard about the fire at Trinity High School. He didn’t have many details but knew school was canceled. Wondering just how serious it was, we theorized it was something small — maybe an electrical fire — that could probably be dealt with. He had driven by and said the outside of the building looked OK.
So, I assigned the story to one of our reporters and got back to the last day of my vacation.
A 4 p.m. traffic snarl along Highway 85 in south Watford City like this one on Feb. 13 is a typical sight in the town that went from 1,744 to more than 7,500 since 2010.
WATFORD CITY — There are days, Brent Sanford said, when he struggles to wrap his head around everything happening in his hometown.
Ten years ago, Sanford returned to Watford City to take over his family’s automotive dealership. He soon found himself on the city council and was elected mayor in 2010 — right as oil and gas exploration in the Bakken shale formation was beginning to put a stranglehold on northwest North Dakota communities.
Today, Sanford and other Watford City leaders are facing challenges few small towns in America ever have to endure. All the while, he said, they’re trying to keep their once-quiet community from becoming just another “dirty oil town.”
The goal, Sanford and other city leaders said, is to keep pace with growth that has gripped Watford City because of the unprecedented oil boom — it enters the construction season with $240 million in infrastructure needs, ranging from streets to schools — while maintaining its appeal as a progressive and welcoming home where people want to put down roots.
But that is more challenging than anyone could have ever imagined.
Nothing in America compares to what’s happening right now in Watford City. It’s as simple as that.
As Williston gets the headlines and Dickinson sees the benefits of the Bakken oil boom while not having to deal with the truly dirty side of it, Watford City is stuck right in the middle of it all — “the epicenter” of the biggest shale oil play in American history, as McKenzie County Economic Development Director Gene Veeder put it.
Most of the talk about Watford City in the past couple years has been about the bypass to send Highway 85’s heavy truck traffic around the city. Lately, we learned of a company in Watford City improperly disposing of radioactive filter socks.
But to truly understand what’s happening on the ground, you have to sit down and speak to the city’s leaders.
Mike Gayda stands outside of the Iron Works Welding shop in north Dickinson.
Mike Gayda tried going to college.
After attending Dickinson State University for a short time he acknowledged, “College wasn’t for me.”
So, knowing he had a talent for welding, he took jobs with Steffes Corp. in Dickinson and at the Case IH Steiger plant in Fargo. It was at the latter that the Dickinson native had a chance conversation with a co-worker who tipped him off about welders running their own service trucks in the burgeoning western North Dakota oil fields.
So, in 2006, Gayda decided to move home and start his own business.
“It was perfect timing,” Gayda said.
When he was 20 years old, Gayda started Iron Works Welding with one service truck. He worked out of a heatless quonset on Dickinson’s south side by himself.
By 2008, before the true onset of the oil boom, he had found enough work to hire two employees and build a 6,800 square-foot building on a little less than an acre of land on a space just north of Dickinson in the industrial park off Highway 22.
Dustin Monke 