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No Fear No Favour

Train full of poop: This train is stranded for two months at a small town in Alabama

Hopefully, if you’re reading this, you live far from the town of Parrish, Alabama. Because if you’re not, that means that you’re probably tired of smelling the 10 million pounds of human feces that have been stranded in a local rail yard for over two months.

And to make matters worse, it’s not even from residents who live in the town, because it would take the entire population of 982 residents over 27 years to collectively produce that amount of waste. It’s actually coming down the pike from waste management facilities in the northeastern U.S., namely New York and New Jersey, in large containers labeled “EPIC.” Local agencies struck up contracts with a private landfill 25 miles southeast in Adamsville.

Apparently, neighboring towns of Adamsville have had it with the waste shipments as well. The town of West Jefferson filed an injunction against the landfill to prevent the storage of the waste in a nearby railyard in January. However, it’s been sitting in Parrish, where there are no zoning laws that make the storage illegal, ever since.

Parrish only spans 2 square miles, and the town’s mayor, Heather Hall, says that everything stinks because of the containers. “It greatly reduces the quality of life,” she told CNN, “You can’t sit out on your porch. Kids can’t go outside and play, and God help us if it gets hot and this material is still out here.”

Hall has reached out to both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management regarding the materials in the town’s backyard. Both agencies have told Hall that the material isn’t dangerous because it technically isn’t raw sewage, but is instead considered to be “Grade A biowaste.” Regardless of its classification, the town has compared it to dead bodies and some homes are placed only 50 yards away from the foul-smelling boxes.

So far, there is no estimated time when the fecal freight will be sent out to pasture. At one point, there was 252 tractor-trailer sized loads of the waste in Parrish, and it’s anybody’s guess what the number is now. Hall just wants the waste removed in a timely matter, and has been advised against filing another injunction which may further delay the removal of the waste.

Source: The Drive

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