About two months ago, a train rolled into Parrish, Alabama. Only this train wasn’t carrying passengers, or bank notes, or stolen Nazi gold. This train barreled in from New York City carrying roughly 10 million pounds of human shit—and it’s been rotting in the Alabama sun ever since.
According to CNN, this poop train is just one of many sent from New York and New Jersey to dump its load of biowaste at a private landfill in Adamsville, Alabama, called Big Sky Environmental. But thanks to some state-level bureaucracy, the turd train’s passage has been clogged. Apparently a neighboring town filed an injunction with the landfill to keep the sewage out of its city limits. Now, the train has been left to stink up the two-square mile town of Parrish.
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“It greatly reduces the quality of life,” Parrish mayor Heather Hall told CNN. “You can’t sit out on your porch. Kids can’t go outside and play, and God help us if it gets hot and this material is still out here.”
Hall told CNN that she’s been desperately trying to work with Alabama governor Kay Ivey to get the putrid smelling shit train out of her backyard, but the process has taken a lot longer than she expected. Hall spoke with Big Sky back in February and says she was told that the cars would be removed in seven to ten days. But now it’s April and train cars jam-packed with poop sludge have just continued to sit on the tracks, wafting their distinct scent to the town’s 982 residents.
“It smells like dead bodies,” one Parrish local told NBC affiliate WVTM 13. “You can’t open your door because that stuff gets in your house. It’s really rough,” another said.
The one upside to Parrish’s poop predicament is that the Environmental Protection Agency and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management have both stressed that the train’s smelly load isn’t a biohazard for the town’s residents. The downside, of course, is that an entire town of people is “safely” inhaling rancid fumes from other people’s poop until the local government can figure its shit out.
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