A turnaround day, start to finish

*Turnaround: when a plant shuts a unit down for weeks of maintenance and inspection and hires an army to do it. Baytown has several a year across its plants. This is one day inside one of them, as the crews describe it.*

3:40 a.m. The alarm in a fifth wheel at an RV park off 146. Coffee from the pot you set last night. Boots by the door — the good ones, resoled twice — and the FR shirt that's been washed so many times the orange has gone pink. Hard hat, glasses, gloves, the badge on the lanyard. Lunch in the cooler if you packed it; most don't.

4:15. The Cuban Cafe on Decker Drive is already half full and everyone's in the same clothes. Café con leche, a pressed sandwich, out in ten minutes. Nobody talks much. Doughnut Wheel's kolaches are the other option, and by 4:30 the kolaches are going fast. On the way you pass the Lynchburg Ferry landing; on a weekday it's been running since 4:30 for exactly these people.

5:00. The contractor lot the plant assigned you. Badge from the Baytown Area Badging Office, bus, gate. The safety brief that's the same every day and matters every day: the hazards on this unit, the wind direction, where the muster point is. You pull a permit for the job — hot work, confined space, line break — and then you wait for the permit. Waiting is a third of every turnaround day and everybody knows it; the old hands bring a folding chair.

6:30 to noon. Scaffold goes up. Insulation comes off a line that hasn't seen daylight in five years. A pipefitter measures twice. A boilermaker has been inside a vessel since sunrise with a hole watch sitting at the manway counting him in and out. It's already ninety degrees inside a heat exchanger. Water breaks every hour, by rule, and a medic in a golf cart. An inspector signs off a weld and moves on. Somebody's radio plays Tejano; somebody else's plays Cody Johnson; the crane operator's plays nothing because he's listening to the signalman.

Noon. Lunch from the truck at the gate — tacos, a plate lunch, a Gatorade — or the cooler in your cab. Twenty minutes. The site cafeteria if you're on one that has it.

12:20 to 5:30. More of the same, hotter. This is when the mistakes happen, and everybody knows that too, which is why the afternoon brief is shorter and sharper than the morning one.

5:30 p.m. Twelve hours. Bus to the lot. The parking lot empties in ten minutes because everyone has learned exactly which exit clears first, and Highway 146 does its thing.

6:15. A shower. Laundry once a week, all of it at once, at a laundromat with the big machines. Dinner is Black Bayou if there's a group, a rotisserie chicken from H-E-B if there isn't, Bocanegra's if somebody's spouse is in town. The Chute if it's Friday. Home by nine because the alarm is at 3:40.

Sunday. The one day. The ferry at eleven, or church, or the Nature Center, or a two-hour phone call home from the truck because the signal's better there. Then laundry. Then bed.

It lasts six weeks, sometimes ten. Then the unit comes back up, the crews move to the next plant in Port Arthur or Corpus or Lake Charles, and Baytown gets its hotels back — until the next one. The town runs on this rhythm the way a coastal town runs on tides, and if you live here long enough you can feel a turnaround start by how full the Cuban Cafe is at four.