What is an oil town?

The town of Taft, Calif. celebrates its oil drilling heritage every five years with a festival called Oildorado. Among the events, an "oil field skills" competition to find the best roustabout.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Oildorado is back after a pandemic postponement. The fossil fuel festival in Taft, Calif., celebrates the resource that built the town. Festivities include the Maids of Petroleum pageant and a facial hair contest called Whiskerino. I wonder if BJ Leiderman, who writes our theme music, participated. But Matt Guilhem of member station KCRW was there and sent this audio postcard from California's Central Valley.

MATT GUILHEM, BYLINE: Day or night, the sheriff of Oildorado is keeping an eye out for people to lock up. It's not jail.

BRYAN SELLMAN: Well, it's not. It's called the hoosegow. We call it the hoosegow, yeah.

GUILHEM: Over more than 30 years, Bryan Selman has risen from a deputy in the sheriff's posse to the main guy. Sporting a waistcoat, black cowboy hat and a pair of revolvers, he says his primary job is making people smile.

SELLMAN: We all ham it up and have a good time with it. And that’s what it’s all designed to do.

GUILHEM: Another duty, beard enforcement.

SELLMAN: If you don't have a beard, then you have to get a smooth puss badge. Or we can arrest you, and we take you around town, just hoot it up. And it's all just for fun.

GUILHEM: That's right, gents. You could be headed for the hoosegow if you didn't purchase a smooth puss badge. For those that do get nabbed, it's not that bad. There's talk of chilly adult beverages for the scruff-less. Because it takes over the entire town, Taft celebrates Oildorado only once every five years. But like so many events, the petrol party was called off in 2020. Shannon Miller, the first female president of the Oildorado Committee, is appreciating its return.

SHANNON MILLER: You know, it's 10 days long, and there's 65 events in those 10 days. And I've been able to, you know, have a sigh of relief to see that it's happening, and everybody is receptive to it and people have shown up.

GUILHEM: Over the course of the festival, she expects some 30,000 people to participate. Among them is Les Clark. The lifelong oilman is pushing 80 and got his start in the local oil fields.

LES CLARK: There's a lot of hardworking people out here, and I think that this gives them a time to celebrate and say, hey, we're still here.

GUILHEM: As in, these blue-collar oil jobs continue to be the backbone of Taft. Those are on display in one of Oildorado's events, the Oilfield Skills Competition. There's a category for welding, crane operation and one called roustabout. That's what Alex Hernandez is getting ready for. The 23-year-old was head roustabout at his oil company.

ALEX HERNANDEZ: I had originally just joined for the welding competition. But I was talking to the president of the company, and he asked me to do the roustabout one. I'm more than happy to do it.

GUILHEM: In the oil trade, roustabouts are the grunts who do a lot of the hardest physical labor before they climb the industry ladder. For this category, the competitors have to assemble a yard-long piece of pipe using a bunch of tools, including an orange wrench the length of your arm.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: All right, here we go. Ready? Go.

GUILHEM: Hernandez grabs the wrench and some pipe and sets to work. His focus is intense. At one point, he's pressing so hard on the wrench his feet lift off the ground. There's plenty of hammering, too. With a couple of final swings, Hernandez comes out of his trance.

HERNANDEZ: Done.

(APPLAUSE)

GUILHEM: For not originally signing up for the roustabout contest, Hernandez didn't do too bad.

HERNANDEZ: It went just like it should. I think it's just the nervous - that kind of got to me, the me being nervous. But I think I did pretty good.

GUILHEM: Better than good - he won and is now an Oildorado champion. For the 9,000 or so people who call the town of Taft home, all the hoopla is a way to show their pride. While Oildorado celebrates the community's petroleum past, black gold remains very much a part of the town's present.

For NPR News, I'm Matt Guilhem in Taft, Calif.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE VINE SONG, "MARY JANE")

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Louisiana Legislative Auditor (LLA) Hotline

A hidden treasure lies in the Northwestern corner of the State of Louisiana.  A sleepy town with a vibrant history lies on the shores of wonderful Caddo Lake.  Hidden amidst the oil rigging and equipment yards is a hard working population steeped in the oil industry and its long and fascinating history.  Browse through these pages and get a great insight into what Oil City was, is and can become!!

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Over the last 150 years, oil booms and busts have given rise – and laid waste – to hundreds of towns across the world.

In many places on our planet, striking oil has meant the eruption of new settlements in previously uninhabited places. Where there has been oil, there have usually been people.

But they haven’t always hung around. The world is littered with ghost towns that were once home to newly minted oil barons and workers who dreamt of turning goo into gold.

This is not just history. With the price of crude oil less than half what it was three years ago, many more towns – particularly some American ones – are now being abandoned as the profits evaporate.

“People move in and move out,” comments historian William Caraher at the University of North Dakota, “and there are scars left behind of various types.”

These pictures reveal just a few of the places built – and later deserted – thanks to oil.

Perhaps the most iconic example of an abandoned oil boom town is Pithole City in Pennsylvania. In 1865, drillers flooded into previously uninhabited Pithole. The town had a peak population of 20,000 but by 1870 that had fallen to just 237. In those early days, fewer technologies required petroleum and demand soon ran dry. (Credit: Alamy)

California is home to many troubled drilling towns. Mentryville is now completely abandoned, but you might have seen it used as a setting for episodes of the X-files, the A-Team and Murder, She Wrote. It’s been reported that when many Mentryville residents left in the 1930s, several dismantled their houses and took the materials with them. They were, it’s said, too poor to buy or build anew elsewhere. Today residents in the nearby town of Bakersfield are experiencing their own oil bust plight. As BBC News reported recently, local businesses are struggling thanks to unemployment – caused by the recent dip in crude prices. (Credit: Wikimedia / CC by-SA 3.0)

Some oil boom “towns” were often the sites of camps with temporary housing for workers, as was the case in Orla, Texas. Sandy Countryman, a former resident who lived there as a child, has posted memories of the camp online. She mentions the Baptist church where her mother used to play piano. “A recent visit found the roof leaking, the double entry doors standing ajar, old scripture material scattered about, and a fox living in the back,” she writes. (Credit: Alamy)

Oklahoma is another state that hosts a raft of now forgotten ghost towns, such as Burbank. In the '20s it was home to 3,000 people, but by 1930 that figure had fallen to just 372. Many other towns in the state, like Three Sands and the appropriately named Whizbang, also suffered population crashes as the price of oil fell or production became automated. (Credit: mtnee_man/flickr/CC BY-ND 2.0)

Just four years ago, news stories gushed about the new oil boom that had flooded towns like Williston, North Dakota, with fresh wealth. The growth was so rapid that new housing had to be built for workers attracted by the promise of the Bakken – an ancient rock formation where much drilling for oil and gas had begun to take place. However, the current low price of oil has caused much of this industry to disappear, and people have left with it. “Some [short-term housing] is occupied by squatters but in most cases it’s empty,” explains Caraher, who studies workforce housing in the area. “If the price of oil doesn’t go up, the owners don’t necessarily have a plan”. (Credit: Getty Images)

Some oil bust ghost towns were never home to anyone in the first place. That’s the case with Polphail in Scotland. The town was constructed during the 1970s as accommodation for around 500 staff at a nearby oil platform works. However, the works never opened and Polphail was left to become a ruin. (Credit: Gary Eason Photography)

The lure of oil can even draw people away from towns whose populations were previously quite steady, such as this district of Al Jazirah Al Hamra in the United Arab Emirates, once a fishing port, is a good example. When residents left in the late 1960s to work in the oil industry, the town was more or less abandoned. “Maybe the future of the world is ghost towns,” says Caraher, reflecting on the long list of places made and ruined by the drilling of oil and the mining of precious resources. It seems safe to say that people will always follow opportunity – and not, necessarily, the other way around. (Credit: Kemal Kestelli / Flickr / CC by-SA 2.0)