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around the time natural gas prices spiked in 2008. Gas prices have since dropped, but producers have simply switched their focus to oil and other liquids.
• The drilling is concentrated in sparsely populated areas of western and north-central Oklahoma, where communities have been losing population for years and few have the infrastructure to support more people.
• Woodward, with 12,000 residents at last count, is the largest population center in a nine-county area of gently sloping prairies dotted with oil rigs, wind turbines and one-stoplight towns.
• At the local Dairy Queen, owner Kenny Vassar is considering scaling back the hours the store is open because he can't hire enough workers to cover all the shifts.
• "I never dreamed we'd have to offer a sign-on bonus to work here," said Vassar, who gives employees an extra $200 after three months.

• Vassar said his employees traditionally have been high school kids looking for spending money or married women trying to supplement the family income.
• "We've got kids that don't have to work anymore because Dad is making $28 an hour in the oil field, and the wives don't have to get out and work," Vassar said. "We've got women out there driving oil trucks for $28 an hour."
• Tarin Earnest-Smith worked for more than a decade as an X-ray technician before taking a higher paying job three years ago with a land company that researches and negotiates for mineral rights. She more than doubled her salary.
• "I just liked the money because I could buy land and do more things," Earnest-Smith said. "I did quite a bit of traveling because I had that extra money."
• Paul McFeeters had two jobs -- delivering pizzas and working as a night watchman at a manufacturing facility in Arkansas -- when he landed a job with a hydraulic fracturing crew. Even without his wife's salary as a nurse's assistant, the couple's income jumped from $2,000 a month to $4,000.
• "My wife and I were barely getting by," said McFeeters, who now works with a Woodward-based crew that helps transition hydraulically fractured wells into production. "Now my wife doesn't have to work anymore."
• Carl Harmon was operating a grain elevator when he joined a drilling crew operating across western Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle.
• "I doubled my salary doing that," said Harmon, who said he often works 60 to 80 hours a week on the same crew with McFeeters. "That's what makes you money in the oil field is the overtime."
• Harmon said there's no shortage of opportunity for people who don't mind hard work and long hours.
• "Those people that are looking for jobs everywhere," he said, "they just better fig

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