Chevron Update; Will Make Grants Up To $7,000 (WOW!) To Local Fire Depts.

[hatrack]

EDIT

The pizza isn’t the only relationship-mending effort Chevron is undertaking after the fire. The company will also donate grants ranging between $1,000 and $7,500 to fire departments that operate in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale region, where much of the state’s fracking takes place.

But activists say the pizza coupon is just the most outlandish of the many ways Chevron and other oil and gas companies have tried soften their image, as fracking stirs controversy over environmental and health impacts.

“How arrogant and stupid do they think people are?” said Gloria Forouzan, a leader with Pittsburgh-based anti-fracking group Marcellus Protest. “What (fracking companies) are doing in terms of PR is insidious. They advertise, and they advertise heavily, and for that, (people) are basically willing to lie down and let the companies walk all over them.”

Regardless of Chevron’s intentions, others questioned whether the pizza coupon was the best way to convey their sympathies to the community. “With one person missing, that’s a major crisis. You don’t respond in such a meaningless way,” said Ron Smith, a public relations professor at State University of New York in Buffalo and the author of four books about public relations. “This is going to go in one of my textbooks as an example of how to screw up a crisis response.”

EDIT

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/2/18/after-fracking-blastchevronofferspizza.html

[CBGLuthier]

1. But that will cost them .00000000000001 second's worth of profit.

Can we not applaud their sacrifice?

[tanyev]

2. Woo-hoo! Think of all the pizza they can buy with $7,000!

[hootinholler]

3. That $7000 will outfit at most 14 firefighters with turnout gear

Or 1/35 of a cheap fire engine, and I mean cheap.

The vast majority of the wellheads would be responded to by volunteer companies.