US oil states brace for fallout from crude's price bust

Houston

US STATES dependent on oil and gas revenue are bracing for layoffs, slashing agency budgets and growing increasingly anxious about the ripple effect that falling oil prices may have on their local economies.

The concerns are cutting across traditional oil states like Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Alaska as well as those like North Dakota that are benefiting from the nation's latest energy boom.

In Houston, which proudly bills itself as the energy capital of the world, Hercules Offshore said it would lay off about 324 employees who work on the company's rigs in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the month.

Texas has already lost 2,300 oil and gas jobs from October to November, according to preliminary, seasonally adjusted data released earlier in December by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. On the same day, Fitch Ratings warned that h…