Call it sawdust in his veins. Chip Piazza had known he wanted to build things since he was a kid. There was no doubt construction would be his future. “My father, Pete, was a residential contractor, so I was around building all the time. I liked drawing house plans in the drafting program in high school. Building picked me, I didn’t pick it,” he said. “I pretty much knew what I wanted to be, being around construction so much as a kid.”

The rattle of the alarm echoed across the area, signaling a chlorine leak from a storage tank at the large industrial plant in Grayson County. As the men encased in the special gear that gives them the look of moon-walking astronauts went about the very serious job of dealing with the problem, a company representative standing a safe distance from the scene remarked.