It’s a dark winter morning and I’ve set the alarm for 5am so I can see a chimney being blown up.
Today Longannet Power Station’s towering 600ft stack will be destroyed by 700kg of explosives.
And I’ve got a front-row view.
Sense of ceremony as Longannet tower is erased from the landscape
It’s not just an emotionally charged day for all those who worked at the plant before it was closed in 2016.
It’s an opportunity for the Scottish Government to prove, through the deployment of carefully placed dynamite, that they are serious about cutting carbon emissions.
Longannet was Scotland’s last coal burning plant.
ScottishPower’s chief executive said razing it to the ground sends a message that there is no going back to the old ways.
After parking up, I was asked if I was attending the ‘event’. The very word made me realise that this was more than a normal reporting job. There was a sense of occasion.
Alighting from the shuttle bus, we were greeted by some kilted pipers. It was a surreal moment, amid the industrial dereliction just visible under the generator-powered floodlights.
Stack’s final sunrise
At this point, the doomed stack itself was hidden in the darkness.
But before long the sunrise started to illuminate Scotland’s most colossal free-standing structure for what would be the last time.
For just a few moments, it was bathed in pink sunlight. It was a final glimpse of a structure which had provided employment, put food on many tables and sustained a community.
It had also hit the headlines for the wrong reasons.
Longannet was named as Scotland’s biggest polluter in 2003.
And ash from the power station, stored in the Valleyfield lagoons, has caused dust clouds to billow over local villages.
But the plant’s closure came at a cost.
Longannet had a workforce of 370 and supported an estimated 800 jobs indirectly through the supply chain.
Most ScottishPower employees managed to find other work.
However, the Scottish Government’s Just Transition Commission said the community had felt abandoned after the closure.
Fast forward a few years and all that remains of Longannet is a cordoned off lonely tower beside a temporary marquee.
It was a sad day for many who had made their living and built friendships as power station employees.
A lone piper played a final lament before First Minister Nicola Sturgeon set off the fuse.
Dynamite crackled, cement crumbled and the ground shook, calling time on Scotland’s coal burning era.
The sunrise will never look the same again.
