Mobil Harvests Good Will From Tours at Refinery

With refinery officials calling it an unqualified success, a series of public tours of the Mobil Oil Corp. refinery ended Saturday in Torrance.

More than 2,000 people took the tours, which were run on four different Saturdays and one Sunday. The tours, originally set for only two Saturdays, were expanded to accommodate all the people who requested reservations, Mobil officials said.

“Word of mouth did have an effect, and people were calling up to ask when they could come, when we hadn’t even mailed anything to their neighborhood yet,” Mobil spokesman Barry Engelberg said.

Mobil eventually mailed tour invitations to every household in the city, he said.

The tours were part of Mobil’s campaign to show off the refinery’s good side. In 1987 and 1988, the refinery suffered a series of accidents in which three workers were killed and more than a dozen seriously injured. The city has asked a court to give it additional powers to regulate the refinery, and in March residents will vote on whether to effectively ban hydrofluoric acid, a highly toxic chemical used at the refinery.

About 420 attended the tour Saturday. Mobil officials said that, beyond the numbers, they were surprised at the level of interest among the visitors. Many participants would spend more than two hours looking at special exhibits after finishing their 45-minute bus tour around the plant.

Jerry S. McCreery, who has lived a few blocks from Mobil for the past 19 years, said he took the tour with his family Saturday to dispel their fears about occasional noises, smells and emissions coming from the facility.

“I already felt there wasn’t as much need for concern as everyone was saying,” said McCreery, who works at a hazardous waste management firm. “There’s so much hype about toxicity, and we wondered what Mobil was doing here.”

The participants toured the facility’s maze of machinery and along the way were given Mobil’s Frisbee-style disks, coasters and drinking containers and even Mobil-manufactured plastic bags in which to carry it all. About a dozen employees distributed literature and answered questions on refinery operations.

Mobil spent about $25,000 to conduct the tours. Torrance officials rejected their original plan to stage a festive, $200,000 open house on a single weekend. The city refused to issue permits Mobil needed for temporary structures, electrical wiring and crowd control. City officials said they were worried about having as many as 12,000 visitors on refinery grounds.

One woman said Saturday to Mobil officials that she went on the tour because she wanted to “hear what you had to say that the city didn’t want me to hear.”

Engelberg said Mobil will continue to offer small, private tours for community groups.