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Change of such scope and intensity is bound to raise questions. Thousands of people are converging on the area, looking for work, looking for redemption, looking for trouble. And jobs are plentiful. In Williston, in the heart of the oil patch, the unemployment rate is less than one percent. But how does a region of farms and small towns weather the human onslaught?

I've searched for the meaning of this sentence,but it doesn't match the context? your help and replies would be much appreciated.

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  • I might have upvoted this question had you gone into more details about how you search for the meaning of this sentence. Did you look up onslaught in a dictionary? The expectation on ELL is that not only do you look these words up, but you also tell us which dictionary you looked in and told us what you found.
    – J.R. ♦
    May 23, 2018 at 14:26

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See definition #2 of the noun onslaught in the Collins English Dictionary:

If you refer to an onslaught of something, you mean that there is a large amount of it, often so that it is very difficult to deal with.

Thus, the phrase human onslaught would mean a situation that's very difficult to deal with because of an overwhelmingly large number of people that are involved in it.

One of the meanings of the verb to weather (see definition #3) is to withstand a difficulty or danger.

With all that knowledge at our disposal, let's now paraphrase that sentence like this:

But how can a region of farms and small towns withstand such an overwhelmingly large number of people that just keep coming and coming?

Hopefully, things are a lot clearer now.

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