Sometimes, you just have to rant. Every once in a while, as Peter Griffin once so eloquently said, there are aspects of life that tend to “grind my gears.” Here are a few of them that popped up last week:
Continue reading “Spills in the state and a ‘State’ of laughter”
We asked. You answered. The Press survey results show readers have mixed feelings on the boom’s impact; feel Dickinson is a worse place than it was 5 years ago.
The oil boom has changed Dickinson and southwest North Dakota’s way of life — and a majority of people don’t like it, according to a Dickinson Press survey.
Of the 1,310 readers who voted in the survey online or through the newspaper over the last two weeks, 57 percent said they don’t believe the area is a better place than it was five years ago. Sixty-four percent have mixed feelings on the energy industry’s impact on the area, saying it has brought a combination of good and bad impacts.
In response to the survey’s results, Dickinson Mayor Dennis Johnson said he understands there is a “significant minority” who have been negatively impacted by the oil boom, whether it’s because of increased housing costs, a higher cost of living or everyday issues, such as dealing with increased traffic or longer lines at the grocery store.
“In general, what’s happening here is good,” Johnson said. “But it isn’t good for everybody.”
On Wednesday, I made a quick trip to Southwest Grain’s Boyle Terminal between Taylor and Gladstone to take a photo of Delane Thom, the cooperative’s manager. He had been interviewed for a national story by Reuters titled “Grain trains scarce on the Plains,” that we ran Thursday on our front page.
I spent 15 minutes chatting with Thom about the issues facing elevators throughout North Dakota, particularly those out west in the Oil Patch areas. I came away with an even better understanding of what people like those in Thom’s position are facing as they head into another busy season, trying to appease producers tired of hearing that an elevator with millions of bushels of space has no room and then begging BNSF Railway to send a few more trains their way to help free up space, only to watch a train hauling 110 cars full of oil roll east past the facility.
So much attention is being paid to those train cars carrying Bakken oil and its volatility that most forget about the issues facing local grain cooperatives throughout the region.
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.
Continue reading “Sculpting success: Oil boom helps Dickinson native’s welding business take off”
I’ve always wondered about the people who protest certain topics. Are they really that upset? Does everything rile them up that much? Does somebody pay these people to protest? Is this their job?
Lately, every time there is political movement on the Keystone XL pipeline, there’s an environmental activist group there with a protest — though we don’t get to see it because the protests usually only take place in a coastal California city like San Francisco or Los Angeles, and, of course, Washington, D.C. Both places are so far from where the proposed pipeline would go that one has to wonder why people would protest for something they’ve likely never seen in a place they’ve likely never been nor ever plan to go.
Dustin Monke 