Relentless winds. Nonstop rain. Epic flooding and destruction. Hurricane Harvey brought it all. ExxonMobil employees responded with resolve, perseverance and selfless inspiration. Here are a few of their stories. In their ownwords
The massive storm roared out of the darkness of the Gulf of Mexico at 10 p.m. on Friday, August 25, and slammed into South Texas with winds of more than 130 miles per hour. The hurricane leveled homes and businesses in Port Aransas and Rockport with a force likened by one resident to “a bomb blast going off.” After a brief foray inland, Harvey weakened, did an about- face, and tracked back over the warmwaters of the Gulf. Now a tropical storm, it stalled over Houston for nearly five days,
dropping upwards of 50 inches of rain in some areas and causing widespread catastrophic flooding. Days before impact, ExxonMobil teams were preparing: shutting in production and evacuating crews from offshore platforms; assembling workers at its refining and chemical complexes in Baytown and Beaumont to shut down facilities safely; evaluating the effects of potentially idle pipelines and marketing terminals on gasoline and product supplies; and setting up emergency response and monitoring centers,
human resource hotlines and recovery action plans after the storm passed. When the rains began to fall and the waters began to rise, thousands of people – including hundreds of employees and their families – were forced from their homes, many of them given little time to gather what they could before evacuating. We could fill the pages of this magazine with their accounts, because when an event like this occurs, it affects everyone, regardless of where you live, the position you have in the company
or how long you have worked in your job. The stories here are a small example of the wider impact and response to the storm – the heroism of first responders and volunteers, the taking in of families in need, the rescuing of the suddenly homeless, the delivery of food and water to the hungry, and more. There’s a commonality to these stories that encompasses not only caring for one’s immediate family, but also for the wider community. They also show an incredible dedication to helping the company get its operations
10 Story by Bob Davis
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