Grangemouth Skies

I live a couple of miles away from the Grangemouth oil refinery.

Most of the operations of the refinery are remarkably non-polluting. While TV news loves to show pictures of huge smoke clouds coming from the cooling towers, they never point out that it is in fact just steam that you are seeing. They never point out that the cooling water used by the plant is so well filtered that it goes back into the Forth cleaner than it was when it was taken out of the river!

But when something is not quite correct in the process and the plant needs to flare off the incoming oil, the result is a pretty spectacular flame shooting high into the air.

From where I am, I never see the flare from my house - but I can certainly see its effects as it reflects off the low clouds!