The Great Smoky Mountain Journal
Source:
Tuesday, January 01, 2019 02:48 PM
Stinking Trainload Of Human Waste From NYC Stranded In Alabama Town Of Parrish
In Parrish, Alabama, population 982, the sludge-hauling 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.”
All kinds of waste have been dumped in Georgia, Alabama and other Southern states in recent years, including toxic coal ash from power plants around the nation. In South Carolina, a plan to store radioactive nuclear waste in a rural area prompted complaints that the state was being turned into a nuclear dump.
In 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 (30 kilometers) 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.