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Ten Million Pounds of Human Feces Stranded in a Town for Months – now Residents are Livid

Alabama is currently in the midst of a huge poo problem and that stinks for the towns close to the landfills where thousands of tons of sewage is dumped regularly. Where does the waste come from, you ask? New York City, which produces over 1,200 tons of stinky human feces every day, transports most of the poop to cities nearby and downs them in landfills around Birmingham.

As if that wasn’t enough, the city created a new problem for a small town in Alabama called Parrish where 10 million pounds of sludge has been rotting away in a rural rail yard for months.

10 million pounds of human waste has been stranded in an abandoned railyard in Birmingham’s town of Parrish for two months

Alabama’s Bio-waste Crisis

The waste management department in New Jersey and New York City thinks that ridding their cities of the stinking poo problem simply means stowing 10 million pounds of human feces in an abandoned rail yard in Parrish, Alabama, and hoping for it to miraculously disappear overnight.

But the trains full of sludge are still here, several moths later, becoming a huge thorn in the side for the 1000 residents who live in the small town and have to put up with the terrible odor of rotting carcass wafting from the railyard. And to add to the town residents’ misery, the poop isn’t even theirs to begin with.

For the past several months, hundreds of tons of human waste were being shipped from New York City and New Jersey to a private landfill in Alabama called Big Sky Environmental, but the smell became too much to bear for the neighboring town of West Jefferson where the lawmakers passed a zoning law to prevent companies like Big Sky from accumulating sewage in landfills. But, by the time the injunction was filed, a train carrying 10 million pounds of sludge was already on its way to the landfill and had to be rerouted to Parrish, a town nearby which had no zoning laws that could prevent the waste management department from dumping the poop into abandoned railyards.

Waste Stranded in Town for Months

The waste has been stranded in the town for two months now, and Parrish has had enough of it. The town mayor, Heather Hall, says that, like the other residents, she isn’t too happy about the situation and is trying to do everything she can to remove the 10 million pounds of rotting freight from the railyard.

She recently met up with Kay Ivey, the Governor of Alabama along with other lawmakers from the state to discuss the pressing issue of bio-waste storage. The Governor assured Hall that he would take care of the situation, but that was weeks ago and no one has still done anything about it.

Hall said that smell from the railyard had permeated into the entire town and she is afraid that it might get hard to get rid of it even after the waste has been removed from Parrish. The railyard is close to a number of sports facilities and residential areas which means that almost the entire town is within smelling distance of the rotting sludge. The town residents say that their quality of life has been greatly affected for the past two months since the stench makes it difficult for children to leave the house and play outside or sit on the porch to get some fresh air.

The mayor of the town says that the waste management department told her that the rotting freight would be moved out after 10 days but now it has been sitting there for more than two months

An Environmental Hazard?

No one knows when the waste will be removed from the town – if ever – and most residents are scared that the smell might get a hundred times worse once the weather starts to get a little warmer. While talking to CNN, Hall said that people in the town are afraid to open their windows even though the temperature has climbed up to 81 degrees. The air smells like rotting dead bodies and it’s difficult to even stand outside for a few minutes.

Alabama’s environmental protection agency has assured the mayor that the rotting waste poses no threat to the residents or the environment since its merely Grade A bio-waste but just because the poop doesn’t jeopardize the residents’ health, doesn’t mean that they’re okay to be around it.

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