Oil boom draws entrepreneurs to Permian Basin highway

Quartz:

There’s so much money gushing out of West Texas these days that even a deadly highway doesn’t keep people away. The fracking boom is shredding a key stretch of asphalt that runs from Pecos—site of the world’s first rodeo—through a former ghost town and into New Mexico. But even as the carnage piles up, businesses are blossoming like cactus along US Highway 285.

John Cantu, a gray haired 63-year-old born in Northern Mexico, is one of these entrepreneurs. One look at me and he knew my sizes exactly: 32-inch waist, 32-inch inseam, medium shirt.

I didn’t expect that kind of sartorial expertise from a guy selling clothes by the side of the road on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. While Cantu showed me the thousands of pieces of fire-resistant clothes in his trailer, trucks carrying sand, water, and hulking fracking equipment rumbled by on US 285.

Cantu got the idea a few years ago when he was buying industrial clothes from rag houses—warehouses that buy thousand-pound bails of used clothing—to sell in Louisiana. After a while, customers started asking him for fire-resistant clothing, known as FR in the business.

Cantu had never heard of the garb, which is sometimes made from synthetic fibers like non-combustible modacrylic. He discovered that demand for FR was coming from the oil fields in West Texas, where it’s standard issue for workers. He bought a load of inventory to make a trial run near Pecos, and his FR quickly sold out, like shiny belt buckles at a rodeo.
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The people, mostly men, working on the fracking rigs often put in 14-hour days, for two weeks on and then one week off. That makes simply driving to work dangerous, amid the gauntlet of exhausted drivers and heavy trucks. Newspapers have dubbed US 285 the “Death Highway.”
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US 285 is just one symptom of the West Texas fracking boom, which is so ferocious the local infrastructure—from schools to hotels, restaurants, and roads—can’t keep up with it. Vehicle crashes in Reeves County, where a key stretch of the highway is located, have risen 300% in the past decade as the oil frenzy revs up.
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There is much more about the exotic world surrounding the production of oil and gas in the Permian Basin.  It has gone from being a West Texas desert to teaming with people trying to meet the needs of those in the oil fields who are trying to meet the needs of energy consumers.