Mobil Sends Invitations to Residents to Tour Plant

Denied the permits they need to conduct a full-scale open house, Mobil Oil Corp. officials instead have mailed more than 20,000 letters to homes near their Torrance refinery inviting them to tour the facility.

Opening with a breezy “Dear Neighbor” greeting, the letters say Mobil has set aside two successive Saturdays--Oct. 28 and Nov. 4--to sponsor a series of hourly group tours for roughly 40 people at a time.

“We’re anxious to share with you not only how the refinery operates, but also the results of our extensive modernization programs,” the letter, signed by refinery manager Wyman Robb, says.

Mobil had hoped to attract as many as 12,000 people to a festive, $200,000 open house on Oct. 7, featuring refinery tours, informational booths, free food and rides on a Ferris wheel and carousel.

But Torrance city officials, expressing concern that the crowd would not be safe on refinery grounds, balked at the plan late last month and refused to issue the permits Mobil needed for temporary structures, electrical wiring and crowd control.

Instead, city officials offered Mobil the use of nearby Columbia Park for the assembly, with buses leaving at regular intervals to take small groups on tours of the refinery.

Mobil officials angrily rejected that idea because it would not bring people directly to the refinery.

Mobil now will rely on its own buses and existing meeting areas to sponsor the tours, which Mobil hopes will attract several hundred people each day.

“This may take a little longer and it may be viewed as a little more complicated than the open house, but if this is what it takes to satisfy the city, we will comply and this is how we’re going to do it,” Mobil spokesman Barry Engelberg said.

Refinery officials will control the number of people on refinery grounds by requiring reservations for a specific tour time, Engelberg said.

Assistant City Manager Albert Ng said the city has no problem with Mobil’s new plan.

“Most companies have tours of one type or another. This is no different,” Ng said.

Northwest Torrance Homeowners Assn. President Fred Casstevens said the tour is nothing out of the ordinary. Many of Mobil’s neighbors already have toured the facility with a number of community groups, including homeowners organizations, school groups and chambers of commerce, he said.

“The letter doesn’t say anything different than they’ve already been doing for at least a year,” Casstevens said.