Since January, almost a full year ago, trains full of human and animal waste from NY have stalled in the town of Parrish, Alabama. Although Parish’s condition might sound like a confined situation in which isn’t involving a level of exposure, the 982 residents of this poor town would probably disagree with you.

Why is this happening you might ask? It’s simple, for the past couple years, all kinds of waste have continued being dumped in southern states such as Alabama and others just because there are less regulations on it and more space/opportunity for companies to take advantage of.

The south has started to have it’s end with it though, towns like West Jefferson, Alabama have officials such as the mayor putting a stop to it by enforced injunctions and lawsuits against the landfill corporations. This all resulted with the trains moving to Parish as the lawsuits were taken care of, this is where they stayed and remained for the following year due to Parish lacking the zoning regulations West Jefferson had to inforce.

As the situation continued to not be taken care of, residents and even the mayor of Parish, Heather Hall, talked about the smell being “unbearable, especially around dusk.” She specifically mentioned “it smells like rotting corpses, or carcasses.” Other residents were even heard of dabing mint oils under the nose to disregard the smell coming from a whole half-mile away.
To help get a better understanding of why situations like this are prolonged and made someone else’s responsibility, Benjamin Norland, environmentalist and teacher, stated how “It’s a great example of a narrow minded approach to waste management. A lot of this trash can be traced, the research should be to why Alabama was taking New York’s trash to begin with.” He then later made sure to note how examples of proper management can even be seen in states like Connecticut where the state takes care of their individual waste and it is all converted into energy at a generation plant.

Hearing about setups and resolutions such as this one can make people ponder why this isn’t already the case for all other states? The issue though relies in fixing the political decisions that are made to resolve the laws in these other states in order to prevent these cases from further occurrence.