The oldest continuously operating oil refinery in the United States is located...
In Bradford, PA.
Want to help celebrate 125 years of petroleum goodness? Check out the anniversary website and make plans to get down this September.
Either way, check out the site. I love the picture on the opening page. It shows the refinery in all its glory. It's huge. And a creek flows directly through it.
I think it says something important about these people that they don't hide or sugar-coat that aspect of the operation. They don't see a problem with it. You want oil products, you have to have a refinery. And it has to be somewhere. A more "sophisticated" PR department would have spun it a bit and offered a picture of smiling babies, or a joyfully diverse group of lunch-pail types laughing it up on pay day. Nope. Not ARG. They show it as it is. Love it or leave it.
Of course, leaving it entails consequences that nobody wants to face. They just keep complaining--as they continue buying oil. And ARG keeps refining it.
Industry lives.
Can we reduce this to Tarzan logic? Steel good. Oil bad. Ever notice that all those steel mills sat hard on the banks of every river in this region and dumped stuff in them for nearly a century. As I kid, I used to sit in a Baden department store and watch carloads full of hot slag dumped in the Ohio. Sure people were earning big bucks...but what were the folks downstream drinking?
I might have missed a core beliefs on this blog somewhere but what exactly is the new industrialism -- and how does it help people and economies without harming the environment and people? I'm not being snarky. Just curious.
Posted by: Sean McDaniel | March 15, 2006 at 06:05 PM