BREATHE EASY, ’BAMA
10M lbs. of NY poop gone
Oh, what a relief it is! The 10 million pounds of putrid New York City poop that created a “nightmare” stench for months in a small Alabama town has finally been dumped, officials told The Post. “They are gone!” Parrish Mayor Heather Hall said Wednesday. The last container of human waste was hauled away from the tiny, 2-square-mile enclave Tuesday afternoon — giving its 982 residents the freedom to go outside without wanting to throw up. Since early 2017, waste-management facilities in the Big Apple have shipped their sewage sludge to a the Big Sky Environmental landfill in Adamsville, about 20 miles east of Parrish. The poop was trucked to the landfill from a station in West Jefferson, until that town sued Big Sky in January, forcing one of the trains to park in Parrish. Since then, the containers were slowly hauled away mostly to Big Sky, but with some going to an old mine in Walker County, Hall said. “It’s been difficult for the town of Parrish,” Hall said. “We’re a very small town. We’re very outdoorsy kinds of people. We like to barbecue, we do sports . . . We have a semipro football team, and all those sports activities are located next to the rail yard.” The “death”-smelling poop stench, Hall said, has “made it difficult for those who wanted to go to those events.”
“The only thing that saved us from this being worse is because we’ve had a cold winter and a cold spring,” the mayor added.
“We’re really grateful that the material left before summer — because I can’t even image what the smell would be like when it was 95 or 100 degrees.”
Parrish resident Jeremiah Howze, 28, told The Post the smell would have been “so awful” that his four young kids wouldn’t have been able to go outside.
New York was attracted to Alabama as a poop-dumping ground because of that state’s loose zoning laws, experts said.
Nelson Brooke, of the environmental group Black Warrior Riverkeeper, told The Associated Press that Alabama is “kind of an open-door, rubber-stamp permitting place” for landfill operators.
Hall said “no hard feelings” to the Big Apple, but pleaded, “Please don’t send any more.”
“We’re really grateful it’s gone, and we don’t want it back,” she said, adding, “I think it’s a flawed system that [New York City] is using to get rid of their material. I think there’s a better way to do it.”
New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Ted Timbers confirmed to The Post that the Big Apple has discontinued shipping waste to Alabama — for now.