ATLANTA – The last train car full of New York City sewage sludge that has stunk up a small Alabama community for more than two months has finally been emptied, the town’s mayor said this week.
For more than two months, the sludge has blown an unbearable stench throughout the tiny town of Parrish, Ala., population 982.
All of the containers have now been emptied from the train, Parrish Mayor Heather Hall said Wednesday. Some of the containers are still at the site, awaiting shipment back to the northeast U.S., she said.
The sludge is a byproduct of New Yorkers’ excrement. It was shipped to the nearby Big Sky landfill. Hall said after a public outcry, the Norfolk Southern railroad required Big Sky to hire more truck drivers so the sludge could be removed from the train cars more quickly.
“Other towns and cities have been fighting this material in their towns for years,” Hall said in announcing the end of what she described as a nightmare. “While what happened in Parrish was, to our understanding, an unprecedented event, there are still small towns like Parrish fighting this situation on a smaller scale.”