April 18, 2018
A stinking trainload of human waste from New York City is stranded in a tiny Alabama town, spreading a stench like a giant backed-up toilet. In Parrish, Ala., population 982, the sludge-hauling "poop train" cars have sat idle near the Little League ball fields for more than two months, Mayor Heather Hall said. The smell is unbearable, especially around dusk after the atmosphere has become heated, she said. “Oh my goodness, it’s just a nightmare here,” she said. “It smells like rotting corpses, or carcasses. It smells like death.” n Parrish, townspeople are considering rescheduling children’s softball games, or playing at fields in other communities to escape the stink. Sherleen Pike, who lives about a half-mile from the railroad track, said she sometimes dabs peppermint oil under her nose because the smell is so bad. “Would New York City like for us to send all our poop up there forever?” she said. “They don’t want to dump it in their rivers, but I think each state should take care of their own waste.” Alabama’s inexpensive land and permissive zoning laws and a federal ban on dumping New Yorkers’ excrement in the ocean got the poop train chugging, experts say.
Nelson Brooke of the environmental group Black Warrior Riverkeeper, describes Alabama as “kind of an open-door, rubber-stamp permitting place” for landfill operators. “It’s easy for them to zip into a rural or poor community and set up shop and start making a ton of cash,” he said. The poop train’s cargo is bound for the Big Sky landfill, about 20 miles east of Parrish. The landfill has been accepting the New York sewage sludge since early 2017. Previously, it was transferred from trains to trucks in nearby West Jefferson, but officials there obtained an injunction to keep the sludge out of their town. A former state attorney general once described a giant west Alabama landfill as “America’s Pay Toilet.” It was among the nation’s largest hazardous waste dumps when it opened in 1977. At its peak, the landfill took in nearly 800,000 tons of hazardous waste annually. In Parrish, the mayor hopes the material in the train cars is removed before the weather warms up. “We’re moving into the summer, and the summer in the South is not forgiving when it comes to stuff like this,” she said.
