Tuesday night, Dave and I headed in to Strathroy to run a few errands. On the way home, we noticed a bright orange glow in the western sky. As we got a little closer to home, we realized the glow was from a fire. And from the amount of glow… it looked like a big one!

We decided to see if we could find it. When we hit Petrolia (about 35-40 minutes from where we started), I realized the flame was coming from a stack. I grew up in Hamilton, and flames on stacks were a fairly common sight at the steel plants nearby.

It was still pretty far off in the distance, so we kept going toward it. Finally, we got up close and personal at Nova Chemicals (they make plastics), just outside Corunna (a town about 10 minutes south of Sarnia)…. a good 70 km from where we first saw the glow.

I pulled into the plant’s drive (something we were never able to do in Hamilton!), pulled off to the side and Dave took a picture.

The flame is from a process called “flaring” where they burn off excess hydrocarbon gases that cannot be recovered or recycled. We were probably still a good kilometre or more from the actual stack, but you could hear the roar of that flame and feel it’s warmth.

It was a pretty wild site – and a fun little evening adventure.