Up in the Tower - Texas Monthly (subscription)
ust after sunset on November 14, 2014, Manuel Gilbert “Gibby” Tisnado headed to his Friday night shift. He piloted his green Toyota pickup down Texas Highway 225 in the Houston suburb of La Porte, driving east through an artificial twilight of flares, beacons, and safety lights adorning the towers and tanks of the industrial plants that stretch for... Gibby had worked so many nights, weekends, and holidays trying to meet tough production quotas that time often blurred and co-workers felt like family. And some were family: his father and two younger brothers worked at the DuPont complex too, and they exchanged embraces— abrazos —at the south gate whenever their shifts overlapped. Earlier that week, Gibby had run into his father leaving the plant without a jacket, and he immediately removed his own coat and handed it over. The pesticide production unit that Gibby helped monitor—loaded with thousands of pounds of poison—had a history of malfunctioning, and whenever temperatures plunged this low, the problems grew worse. Around six p. m. , he took his place beside three other board operators on the B shift, in a semicircle of office chairs before rows of glowing security monitors and banks of multicolored warning lights and gauges. Source: www.texasmonthly.com
