Last updated on 2013.11.16
Two reasons to hope the geologists are right and that fracking the Bakken won't expand from North Dakota to South Dakota:
1. The feds just designated Williams County, at the heart of the North Dakota oil patch as a "High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area."
Williams County Sheriff Scott Busching said he’s “cautiously optimistic” the designation will mean more resources to fight drug trafficking, which he says has increased “simply because we have more population” and more people from out-of-state coming and going, some of them bringing drugs to the area.
Busching said the FBI already has two agents spending time in the county. The bureau has indicated it would like to station two agents there permanently, but a lack of office space and housing and the area’s high rental rates are barriers, he said.
The number of sworn deputies in the sheriff’s office has more than doubled in the past five years, and Busching said there are times when he could use more. The increase in calls for service hasn’t left much time for routine beat checks, working with schools or other proactive measures, he said.
“We’ve become a reaction force where we’re just chasing calls, wrecks and fights,” he said [Mike Nowatzki, "Feds to Designate Oil Patch County as High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area," Grand Forks Herald, 2013.11.14].
Figure all those police costs into your next gallon of gasoline.
2. The Pope says fracking is bad... or at least the t-shirts he's posing with say so:
Put that in your orthodoxy, Catholic conservatives: no fracking! Water is worth more than gold... and uranium, right, Your Holiness?
Porter if you think that the FBI is sucking some Fed funds into North Dakota, just think about all the DEA money that is headed that way. And then think about the money that the state of North Dakota is getting to help rid the Dakota oil patch of all those bad drug dealing, drug using, oil workers that are living there.
For an eye opener look at "Money Spent on the War On Drugs this Year"
http://www.drugsense.org/cms/wodclock
There's nothing new here folks just more money in a new place. Remember back in the seventies when Wyoming was booming? It was a fun place to go for a weekend if, "you were in the right place at the right time." Any other combination of those two things could have got you hurt or worse.
The Blindman