For oil town, virus spread crippling blow
MIDLAND, Texas — Mayor Patrick Payton struggles to sleep these days, and on a recent evening, his blood pressure was so high when he arrived home from a day at City Hall that all he could do was lie down and stare at the ceiling, trying to find even a fleeting moment of peace, a sense that it was all going to be OK.
Instead, he just felt sick. “You feel nauseous all the time,” he said. “But I am certain every mayor is going through this.”
Payton, 52, is a man who normally radiates positive attitude, a former pastor who leans heavily on his faith. When he ran for the job last fall, part of his platform was about encouraging the people of his remote Texas oil town, the heart of the state’s energy-production region, to think more highly of themselves and their city, to value what they did above ground as much as the work they did below.
But what has happened here over the past several weeks has tested even him. An oil-price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia sent the cost of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark crude, plummeting.
Literally overnight, the energy industry in the Permian Basin, where Midland is and which accounts for about a third of all U.S. oil production, began to shut down. Hundreds of workers were immediately laid off; rigs and production work were idled.
In a region where nearly every aspect of industry is touched in some way by the energy sector, fear quickly spread among the town’s residents who remember all too well the oil bust of the 1980s, when tens of thousands of people lost their livelihoods and struggled for years to recover.
“It was like a switch flipped,” Payton recalled. When he went to bed March 8, Midland was OK, in the midst of an oil boom that had transformed the city of about 173,000 — up 29% since 2018, one of the fastest rates in the country, according to the Census Bureau.
The next morning, things were in free fall. “We woke up to the industry shutting down, and that’s not exaggeration,” Payton said. Workers began lining up for unemployment, and long lines of cars formed at the food bank. The economy was tanking in ways unseen for decades. “The old phrase of ‘on our knees’ would be an understatement,” he said.
And this was before the coronavirus began spreading toward his city.