How one North Dakota town hit its stride during the Great Recession (ABC News)

How one North Dakota town hit its stride during the Great Recession originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

It's been a decade since the Great Recession sent unemployment and foreclosures soaring in most parts of the country, but even during dark times, there was a bright light fueled by an oil boomtown in North Dakota.

In Williston, North Dakota, pumpjacks stand tall in bright yellow sunflower patches and work in rhythm amid vast fields of wheat atop the Bakken oil patch in a town that’s nestled in the small northwest corner of the state just 80 miles from the Canadian border. Oil helped inoculate Williston from the effects of the recession felt deeply elsewhere throughout the United States.

The oil patch started out as a lure for young men looking for work, but the abundance of jobs there led to droves of skilled workers, with families in tow, to plant what the city hopes are permanent roots.

ABC News' Aaron Katersky spoke with locals -- who have watched Williston's landscape change over the past 10 years -- for the three-hour ABC Radio news special, “America Works: 10 Years Since the Great Recession.”

PHOTO: Tank cars are seen at a transfer station called a 'Colt Hub,' operated by Inergy Crude Logistics, waiting to be filled with crude oil from trucks coming in from the Bakken oil fields in the small town of Epping, N.D., Sept 15, 2013. (Ken Cedeno/Corbis via Getty Images) More

Since 2007, Williston's population has tripled from 12,000 to 36,000. City administrator David Tuan told ABC News that the opportunity for work was the stark difference that set this oil town apart from the rest of the country during the recession.

"[Many think] it’s cold and it’s barren and there's nothing up here and that’s certainly not true," Tuan said. "There’s a lot of activity, there’s a lot of opportunity."

He said that Williston's steady growth since 2008 has perpetuated increased demand for more workers, like Charlie O’Connor.

O’Connor was one of the tens of thousands of people who flocked to Williston to escape the economic pain. With just four months left before earning his associates degree in Colorado, O'Connor purchased a one-way Greyhound bus ticket to Williston and never looked back.

PHOTO: Charlie O'Connor moved to Williston, North Dakota from Colorado at the peak of the town's oil boom. (Andrea Duntz, City of Williston) More

"I had a backpack full of clothes and 20 bucks in my pocket and a couch to sleep on when I got here," O’Connor said. "I had a kid coming in two months so I had to make a decision and I couldn’t wait four months to get out of school, another six months to get some money rolling in. So I chose to come up here."

"It was booming so bad there was no housing."

"The Walmart parking lot was packed with campers and people sleeping in their cars,” he continued. “Even in the wintertime people were sleeping in their cars cause there was no housing."

On top of wages, O'Connor said the company he works for also offers tax-free stipends. He started out working on an oil rig and worked his way up to a welding inspector, and he receives an additional $115 per diem on top of his paycheck.

"They have to pay very competitively to get people to move here, so there's an abundance of high-paying jobs," he said. "It’s almost surreal that it’s like another country almost."

But O’Connor said the draw of the oil field jobs made several other businesses in town suffer.

“Nobody wanted to move here and work at a restaurant or movie theater because there wasn’t enough money in it,” he said. “Everybody moved here to work in the oil field, and the people that were working in town jobs left to work in the oil field so now you have a surplus of people with no resources in town.”

The local Walmart, for example, didn't even have the resources to operate normally, he said.

"There'd just be pallets in the aisles cause there wouldn’t be employees to stock the shelves," O'Connor recalled. "It was almost unlivable. If you wanted to eat you’d better eat at home or you better be ready to sit at Applebee’s for two and a half hours."

Story continues