Chevron workers must travel through
the streets of their communities every
day to arrive at work or to return home
to family. Our goal is that each of them arrives unharmed — while making the
whole community safer through our Arrive
Alive initiative. The aim of Arrive Alive
is to help key stakeholders in countries
where we operate eliminate fatalities and
injuries among the public as well as among
Chevron employees and contractors. Now
operating in six countries (Bangladesh, El
Salvador, Guatemala, Nigeria, South Africa
and Uganda), Arrive Alive forms coalitions
within each nation to work collaboratively
toward road safety improvements. Chevron
provides initial funding and organization,
while other coalition partners — such as
municipal governments, public safety
officials, trade unions, commercial businesses
and nonprofit groups — participate
in identifying, developing and implementing
programs in advocacy and education;
enforcing existing laws; and correcting
dangerous intersections.
Over a two-year period in our well-
established
Guatemala program, the
coalition's actions to make hot spots safer
reduced the number of incidents at those
locations by almost 97 percent. Two new
coalitions, in Bangladesh and El Salvador,
began building partnerships and raising
awareness of the extent of motor vehicle
danger.
Luis Castellanos helped get the Arrive
Alive initiative rolling in Guatemala and
was the local program manager there
before relocating to Chevron's headquarters
in San Ramon, California. While
Castellanos was working in Guatemala, the
Arrive Alive coalition worked to reduce
hazards at several hot spots — including
one intersection where his wife had experienced
a car incident in 2005.
" No one was hurt, but my wife was crying
and was very upset. It was a bad intersection,"
Castellanos reports.
By implementing some fairly simple
changes, such as painting new lane dividers
on the road, the number of incidents at
that hot spot declined dramatically. While
mishaps were common at that intersection
before the changes were made, during
the 2007–2008 reporting period, only one
incident occurred there.
Castellanos sums up the importance of
Arrive Alive like this: "My son is learning to drive now, and so I'm very aware of
all the dangers we are exposed to out
there. With the Arrive Alive program and
our local coalitions, we are saving lives by
what we do. And you never know whether
that life you save may be someone very
close to you."
Updated: May 2009