New York

NYC's Rotting Poop Train Repulses Alabama: Reports

What to Know

  • A train full of New Yorkers' rotting waste is stinking up northern Alabama
  • The train and its 200 shipping containers have been stuck there for weeks amid a legal battle
  • Residents say the stranded train smells like dead animals and they want the shipments to stop forever

A train full of New Yorkers’ rotting poop is reportedly stinking up rural Alabama and residents are none too pleased.

The tons of sewage sludge are in 200 shipping containers on a train that’s been stalled in the northern Alabama town of Parrish for six weeks, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

The train is stuck because of a legal battle centering on the lawfulness of hauling the waste by trucks to the Big Sky Landfill in Adamsville, according to the Journal.

Alabama residents are reportedly up in arms. They say that it’s not just the stranded train; when the waste is transported by truck, it spills onto the roads, and when it reaches the landfill, the stink continues to stick around.

“We didn’t produce it. We don’t want it here,” Parrish Mayor Heather Hall told the Journal.

The New York Department of Environmental Protection told the Journal it has stopped deliveries of the sludge to Big Sky but won’t accept any return shipments.

A New York City spokesman said the city sends about 85 percent of its 1,200 daily tons of biosolid waste to landfills out of state or Upstate, according to the report.

The city used to dump its waste in the Atlantic Ocean via barges before that was banned in 1992. It also sent some of it to a fertilizer facility in the Bronx before rural landfills became the destination of choice, according to the Journal.

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