“But when you see people at their lowest low, and you help them and see them smile by the end of the day, then you know you’re doing your job.”
Laura Hanks Planning and scheduling first line supervisor, Baytown Technology and Engineering complex
Ryan Jarvis, exploration geoscientist, and his family assisted ExxonMobil retiree Gerry Lee and his wife Julie with recovery efforts at the couple’s Sour Lake, Texas home
“It became personal for me when I arrived at one house and realized that the owner was a retired ExxonMobil employee who’d been my mentor, and had actually helped me get hired by the company. After looking around his house, we both broke down. “He was trying to be so strong for his wife and kids in the face of all the destruction. He’d held it in. He took me aside and told me everything they’d been through. I was his sounding board. Sometimes, that’s all a person needs – a good hug and a good, ‘I love you, we’ve got this.’” Ashley Alemayehu Public and government affairs manager, Beaumont complex “Like many other companies in the area, we were ready to step in to help when the City of Beaumont called. It was a true collaborative effort between the city and private sector to get water back on for residents. “I was going back and forth between the refinery, the water plant and the city’s emergency operations center, helping in whatever way I could. We have a long relationship with Beaumont, and I think it has strengthened even further.”
these people come together and say, ‘Hey, I just want to help. No, it doesn’t cost you anything. We just want to help.’”
David Sistiva, construction area supervisor, received assistance from fellow employees
Joey Hanks Shift team lead, Baytown Olefins Plant
other teams were bringing in pallets of water and other essentials by helicopter. “I was working a dual role – doing my job at the refinery while trying to get clean water back up and running to the city, which we did. The other thing the team did was secure the electrical infrastructure for the treatment facility. That was at risk of taking on water, and if it did, all of our efforts would be futile. It took us about eight hours to build a sandbag levee
around the infrastructure to stop that from happening.”
“When you pull up to the first house to help, and you see the homeowner looking just lost, that’s when it becomes personal. “One lady we helped was a school bus driver all her life who’d saved her money and had paid her mortgage off two months before Harvey struck. She lost everything. She didn’t have flood insurance. And she said to me, ‘What do I do?’ And all you can do is to try to tell her that it will be OK.
Byrd Reed Mechanical craftsman, Baytown complex “The ‘Texas Strong’ motto says it all. It means helping other people. Somebody gets a boat, somebody gets this, somebody gets that, and we show up and do what we have to do to get them out of harm’s way. “It’s been a wonderful thing in a disastrous situation to see all of
For more stories and photos from the storm, visit ExxonMobil’s energyfactor.com
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