A Train Full of Human Sh*t from NYC Has Been Terrorizing This Alabama Town for Months

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Shutterstock

Parrish, Alabama stinks. That's not an unfair dig, it's just the truth.

The tiny town of less than 1,000 quite literally reeks like an overflowing toilet, thanks to a train packed with tons and tons of rotting human feces that's been stranded in its midst for months, caught in legal limbo. Residents, who've described the wafting stench as a "nightmare" have rightly had enough of all the shit, and are scrambling to get it removed before the southern heat kicks into overdrive and takes the foul odor into toxic territory.

The crappy saga started back in January, when a train carrying 250 containers filled with sludgy human sewage from New York and New Jersey came chugging through Parrish en route to Big Sky Landfill, about 20 miles to the east. However, to get there it would have had to pass through the nearby town of West Jefferson, which threw a wrench in the whole plan by obtaining an injunction to keep the poop train from entering its borders. That's when the poop train took up residence in Parrish, which lacks the zoning regulations to keep it out.

As you might imagine, literal tons of poop baking in the Alabama sun does not smell good, and people in Parrish have had more than enough. Now, they're threatening to sue the waste management company that was meant to receive it all, Big Sky Environmental, if it doesn't haul the shit away in the next two weeks.

"It's just pure feces. It catches you sometimes, just coming through the air. It takes your breath away," resident Sherleen Pike told the Associated Press.

"Oh my goodness, it's just a nightmare here," said Parrish Mayor Heather Hall, per a report in Bloomberg. "It smells like rotting corpses, or carcasses. It smells like death." It's gotten so bad that they've considered rescheduling kids softball games, or relocating them to places that don't reek of sewage. Some residents have even taken to dabbing peppermint oil under their noses to keep from smelling poop all the time. "We're moving into the summer, and the summer in the South is not forgiving when it comes to stuff like this," the mayor said. 

You may be wondering what a train full of poop from NYC is doing in Alabama. Well, sewage from the country's biggest city is often schlepped out of state, ever since the government banned dumping it in the Atlantic Ocean back in the late '80s. As a result, rural Alabama and similar areas have become popular poop-dumping destinations, because it's easy to make a ton of money doing so. One former attorney general for the state described one of its huge landfills as "America's Pay Toilet," according to the Bloomberg report.

Last week, the town's council met and issued a final ultimatum to Big Sky Environmental, declaring they would file a lawsuit and an injunction against the company and its affiliates if the rail cars full of sludge weren't removed by April 23, according to a story in the local Daily Mountain Eagle newspaper. "We have been very patient," Mayor Hall said. "But our patience is running very thin. We want this stuff out of our town."

Apparently, when it comes to this kind of shit, sometimes you just have to threaten to sue.

h/tBloomberg, Buzzfeed

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Joe McGauley is a senior writer for Thrillist. Follow him @jwmcgauley.