Stranded train packed with NYC waste stinking up town

PARRISH, Ala. — 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 — and the “poop train” is just the latest example of the South being used as a dumping ground for other states’ waste.

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.

Nationally, the waste and recycling industry generates more than $93 billion in gross revenue annually, said Brandon Wright, a spokesman for the National Waste & Recycling Association.