Life under the shadow of a gas-belching Grangemouth oil refinery

Every night in Falkirk in the central lowlands of Scotland, smoke from the nearby Grangemouth oil refinery engulfs the town, and the lights from the industrial complex make the fog glow bright orange. As a child, the writer and playwright Alan Bissett would look out at the factory and occasionally he’d see the unstable chemicals igniting, turning the smoke to flames. When the explosion eventually came, killing two workers and badly injuring his own father, it was a tragedy, but it wasn’t a surprise.