The other 9 to 5

He admits, though, that one of the pleasures of working in the tower is watching thunderstorms roll in, and he remembers one eerie day when the clouds were settled so low and thick that the tower was above them. He could hear the engines roar when planes took off, but he wouldn't see them till they popped up through the fog.

Most people have an inflated idea of his job's stress level, Francis insists, inspired more by Hollywood than reality. Day to day, he says, the planes are just numbers.

"But when something goes wrong, that's when you realize the gravity of it." Recently, he witnessed a plane crash. He wasn't involved, but he could see it through his binoculars.

"Until I heard they were OK, it was probably one of the worst times in my career," he says. "It's not [stressful] until those times."

As the night progresses in the tower, it gets quieter. Due to tight noise controls, few planes come in to Logan in the early hours. Many of the controllers, who vary the eight-hour shifts they work, will go home.

For Francis, the constantly rotating schedule means he can't always make his kids' soccer games and dance recitals, or even be home on Christmas morning, but he doesn't mind.

His four children, naturally, love what their father does. "They're bugging me to come up to the tower," he says.

- Amanda Paulson

Approaching 9 p.m. in Sioux Falls, S.D., the sky is copper and strangely serene. A tornado has just passed through, touching down in Lennox, a sleepy nearby town of about 2,500.

Trooper Lori Olney receives her assignment over a crackling radio. A diminutive but stern woman with bookish glasses and a quick smile, Ms. Olney presses the gas pedal. The engine of her patrol car lifts and whines, kicking the speedometer to 90 m.p.h.

"Tonight we'd planned to work a checkpoint for drunk drivers," she says, "but the governor is in the area because of the tornado, and my boss wants us there."

Fifteen years ago, the single former schoolteacher traded her eraser for a badge of the South Dakota Highway Patrol. Since then, depending on her rotation, she keeps a lone, lynx-eyed watch for lawbreakers traveling the nighttime Interstate. "The night shift runs to five," she says. "I usually get coffee around four."

She has no children, but each shift begins and ends with a long, contemplative walk with her dog. "We even went out before tonight's shift, in the pouring rain," she says.

Drunk drivers take up much of her time. But anything can happen. In Lennox, the tornado has felled trees, damaged a few buildings and knocked out the town's power. Olney's assignment: Enforce a town curfew.

Around midnight a truck flags her down. The driver explains that a sling used to lift a disabled person into bed had broken. Some townspeople are in the hardware store trying to fix it. But they need a flashlight.

Within minutes, Olney is standing in a pitch-black room, her flashlight beam on four men huddled over a vice, straining to bend a steel bolt. "That should do it," one says after several minutes. "Thanks, officer." Back in her car, she buckles up and tells the dispatcher she's back in service.

"I don't know if I'd do this job anywhere else," she says. "People here are good. They're respectful of us."

Five more hours to go.

- Kelly Hearn

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