A Town Called Bob

This is the kind of thing that gets me all worked up and then I have to blog about it: On February Eleventh, a Chevron well outside of Bobtown, Pennsylvania exploded. Ian McKee, who lived about a half-hour away in Morgantown, West Virginia, and worked for a contractor was killed. For five days, the streets of Bobtown were choked with emergency vehicles and the sky was filled with fire and smoke as crews attempted to bring the conflagration under control. Chevron's response? Representatives visited about a hundred people, seeking concerns or questions and leaving a gift certificate for a large pizza and two-liter drink at Bobtown Pizza, which had just opened.
Can you feel the outrage? Corporate America trying to buy off this little town named Bob with some pepperoni and soda? How wrong is that? About twelve thousand people have signed an online petition demanding Chevron apologize, according to petition organizer Karen Feridun. Karen doesn't live in Bobtown. She lives about two hundred miles away. Other signers came from Alaska, Florida and many other states, as well as Australia, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Germany and Italy. Nobody from Bobtown has yet to sign.
That may be because they were satisfied with the settlement. "I thought it was pretty decent of them," said Ray Elli,  who lives in Bobtown, noted that the fire was about a mile outside town, on a ridge, and that people in town didn't feel threatened. His current priority is not getting an apology from Chevron, he said, but getting ready for the spring wild turkey season. It seems as though the prospect of getting dinner from Chevron instead of a protracted lawsuit is a real-life solution for the folks in southern Pennsylvania. Can I get some Crazy Bread with that?