Hundreds of community members attended Chevron Richmond’s annual Community Tour Day on Saturday, Oct. 5, which this year included a classic car show as a new, fun feature.
The event is an annual opportunity for community members to get an up-close look at what exactly happens at the 2,900-acre Richmond facility, which supplies about 60 percent of the jet fuel to Bay Area airports and about 20 percent of the region’s automobile fuels, among other products critical to the local economy.
As part of the event, community members went on guided, hour-long bus tours of the facility, with introductions provided by Chevron Richmond Director Tolly Graves. Meanwhile, Chevron employees staffed a number of booths to answer questions on various aspects of the facility such as transportation fuels production, air monitoring, safety, shipping and technology.
“We want to welcome our neighbors in to see what we do, in part to educate on what it takes to run a refinery, and to give them a chance to get their questions answered,” said Graves. “Whether they’re curious, whether they’re angry, however they are feeling, we love to have folks come in, engage and talk about what we do and talk about what’s important to them.”
Luke Honnen, environmental air specialist at Chevron Richmond, was among the employees who volunteered to staff a booth. His booth offered information on how Chevron Richmond monitors air quality to comply with some of the world’s strictest regulations.
“We’re essentially showing the public how we collect data, the type of technology we use, where the air monitoring equipment is located within the refinery and in the community,” Honnen said. “And we’re giving them information about the public website (richmondairmonitoring.org), where they can see the data in real-time.”
Of course, the highlight of this year’s Community Tour Day was a Classic Car Show. The car show was hosted by the Somos Employee Network, a group of Latin American and Hispanic employees at Chevron who work together to support each other’s career development and to organize community engagement projects.
Somos hosted a smaller version of the car show at Chevron Richmond last year during Hispanic Heritage Month. Due to the success of the event, the group decided to include the car show as part of Community Tour Day.
“This year, we wanted to pair the Classic Car Show with Community Tour Day to bring even more people from the community into our facility,” said Khristine Pizarro, who serves as the Somos group’s co-site lead.
Community Tour Day was family-friendly, featuring a live DJ, catered lunch, firefighter-led tours of a Chevron Richmond Fire Truck, and a Chevron STEM Zone, where employees taught young people basic scientific principles via fun activities. One activity had kids riding stationary bikes to see how much energy they can produce through “pedal power.”
Risa Deitner, a power systems engineer at Chevron Richmond who helped staff the STEM Zone, said the goal is that kids “learn something about STEM, and maybe pique their interest in finding out something more.”
That is essentially what Community Tour Day is all about: education, Honnen added. And it goes both ways.
“We all benefit when we learn from each other,” he said.
