THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

But after a train full of human excrement sludge from New York City traveled to Alabama, only to be bureaucratically stuck outside the 1,000-person town of Parrish for more than two months, engulfing the town with a suffocating stench — yeah, that was a saga.

And now at long last, the saga is over. The odor, however, is lingering.

“It smells like rotting animals, or a dead carcass. It seems like there’s a dead animal nearby,” Mayor Heather Hall of Parrish said Thursday. “And it’s not like you just get a whiff of it where it’s just a subtle smell. It is so overpowering you cannot go outside.”

On Wednesday, Mayor Hall announced that she had “wonderful news”: The last of the sludge had been removed, and the town was free at last from the 42-car train with the awful nickname.

The foul odor had been difficult to avoid, permeating all two square miles of the town, about 40 miles northwest of Birmingham, she said.

A federal ban forbids New York from disposing of its treated sewage waste in the ocean. So the city routinely ships it to the South, where landfills can offer better bargains. A nearby one, Big Sky, had accepted the city’s sludge since 2017, according to The Associated Press.

But West Jefferson, a town near the landfill, was fed up with the smell as the loads were transferred from trains to trucks. The town got an injunction to stop the trains in January, at which point the train in question was parked in Parrish.

Parrish was not happy. Last week, the town’s council issued an ultimatum, saying it would file a lawsuit and injunction against Big Sky if the rail cars weren’t removed by April 23, according to the Daily Mountain Eagle, a local newspaper.

Big Sky did not return phone calls seeking comment on Thursday.

The ordeal came to an end as trucks hauled the contents off to the Big Sky landfill in Adamsville, about 20 miles to the west.

// posted by montag @ 1:39 PM