Alabama Town Obviously Not Happy About Trainloads Of (Literal) Crap In Their Town

Trainloads of human poop are rotting in an Alabama rail yard, and nobody
seems interested in moving it away from people.

Train loads of poop - shit, crap, whatever you want to call it - 10 million pounds of it - are sitting in a railyard in Parrish, Alabama.

The fine 982 residents of Parrish are not happy about this. You can imagine why.

The whole situation just goes to show you what happens when a small town, or a person, or a business without a lot of money and without regulations in place can become the victim of aloof businesses, and neighboring communities that have more resources.

The crap has been sitting there for two months, and smells like rotting animal carcasses. By the way, this is mostly human crap. Not produced by the people of Parrish, but by residents of New York and New Jersey.

Summer is rapidly approaching Alabama. When it gets hot the extreme stench will only get worse.

Apparently, nobody gives a, um, shit about this except the people in Parrish.

Here's how Parrish got here, according to CNN.

The companies that handle this call the shit biowaste, I guess to make it sound better, but it's shit. For the past year, waste management facilities in New York and New Jersey have been shipping tons of this crap to Big Sky Environmental, a private landfill in Adamsville, Alabama.

The town of West Jefferson, right near Adamsville, filed an injunction to keep this sludge from being stored in a nearby rail yard. So, Big Sky decided to park it in Parrish.

Obviously, Parrish doesn't like this, as noted above, but they don't have many resources. Big Sky is "solving" the problem by not returning phone calls from the mayor of Parrish, or local news media outlets, or CNN for that matter.

The crap in Parrish was parked there because it was already in transit when West Jefferson got the injunction. But couldn't Big Sky send it back where it came from. Not literally, because you can't insert it back into people, but maybe store it where nobody lives?

Parrish Mayor Heather Hall says she's trying to get the shit train out of town. Hall said Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey and other lawmakers are trying to sort it out, but so far, no luck.

The smell from the train is permeating the town. "It greatly reduces the quality of life. 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 there," Hall said.

Officials are telling the town's residents that this isn't a health hazard, but come on! If it smells that bad, and people are breathing it, it can't be good.

And it's warming up down there. Temperatures around Parrish are supposed to be around 80 degrees on Friday.

Sewage Leak Forces Baseball Game To Shut Down. Ewww!

A smelly sewage problem developed in Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles
during an exhibition game this week. 

Baseball games are called for all sorts of reasons: Rain, lightning, hail. Even snow!

But this is a new one. Sewage forced the premature end of an exhibition game at Dodgers Stadium last week.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the sewage mishap killed the exhibition game between the Dodgers and Angels in the fifth inning on Tuesday.

The LA Times says the Dodgers have not exactly said what was spilled, but we do know it was brown and smelly and didn't seem to want to stop gurgling out.

I totally feel sorry for the groundskeepers who had to try to contain the icky brown flood.

Dodgers Pitcher Ross Stripling had this little editorial comment about the situation.

"Crappy way to end the spring.... Get it?"

Unfortunately,  yeah, we get it.

We're told the problem has been fixed and we can get on with Major League Baseball season in Los Angeles.

Here's the video:

Wet Wipes Becoming The Scourge Of A Sewer Near You

Are wet wipes like this clogging up
sewer systems around the world? 

I'm afraid we're going to have to talk about poop here.

Specifically, cleaning up after poop.

Most of us (I hope!) have used toilet paper. It gets the job done, it goes away with a flush of a toilet and we can just forget about that unpleasantness when we're finished.

But the consumer products industry, ever anxious to sucker us into buying some grand new doodad, has come up in recent years with an "improvement" over toilet paper.

It's wet wipes, and it's supposed to leave you feeling cleaner, fresher, more comfortable after you're done going.

Well, maybe.

But your local Sewage Treatment Workers of America guys and gals are NOT thrilled by this wonderful new product.

Neither should you, especially if you have your own on site septic system, like I do.

You see, after you flush the toilet, the toilet paper in its journey toward your nearest septic system or municipal sewage treatment plant, breaks apart pretty fast.

Through the magic of sewage systems, the toilet paper disappears, and life goes on just swimmingly. Especially if you dare to take swimmingly literally by taking a cool dip in the waters downstream from the sewage treatment plant.

Wet wipes, though, despite the protestations of bathroom marketers like Kimberly Clark, don't break down.

According to The Atlantic, the town of Wyoming,  Minnesota was among the first to sue consumer products giants like Kimberly Clark, Proctor & Gamble, Nice-Pak and others.

The Atlantic interviewed Dave Torma, a public works emplouee in Wyoming, Minnesota and got this

"After wet wipes are flushed, they exit a house through a lateral pipe that connects to a public sewer system, where sewage pumps ensure that the wastewater flows in the correct direction. 

But unlike toilet paper, wet wipes fail to disintegrate. They clog the pumps, causing them to break down and redirect stagnant wastewater back toward houses. Sewer systems must be shut down so that the wipes can be manually removed. When the four-foot pumps are lifted for maintenance, 'it looks like you're pulling up Cousin Itt,' Torma said. 

The toilet paper industry is claiming the wipes they sell do disintegrate and the problems wastewater managers are facing are due to people flushing other, non-disintegrating material down toilets

The Halifax, Canada, water department actually put out a rather entertaining video that does a great job of describing the wet wipes problem. It's worth a watch.

Here's the video. Warning: There is a segment within where you don't want to be eating, or have a sensitive stomach while watching.

 

Florida's "Treasure Coast" Is A Disgusting Goop Of Toxic Algae

The gross algae bloom in Florida. Photo
by Terry Spencer/AP 

Nobody's going in the water and everybody's pointing fingers of blame in Florida for something truly disgusting:

A soupy, icky, possibly toxic algae bloom is gumming up the shoreline at the peak and heat of summer.

As if alligators and unrelenting humidity weren't enough, now you can't go in the water.

Or even near it.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott has declared a state of emergency because of the blue in southeast parts of the state.

And everybody's pointing fingers at each other in blame for the ickiness.

The algae is there because of polluted, phosphorus-laden water coming from Lake Okeechobee, about 35 miles away from the affected areas.

The governor says it's the federal government's fault for neglecting repairs to the lake's old dike system.

He could have a point, since the Army Corps of Engineers is inadequately funded for this type of thing. Plus, there was tons of rain in Florida this past winter and spring, so with their inadequate system, they had to release more tainted water from the lake than usual.

But lots of state officials have looked the other way as farming and other interests have dumped pollution and phosphorus in the Lake Okeechobee. Had they cracked down on that, this not have been such an issue.

As local public radio station WQCS noted, there was a deal in the works back in 2011 for the Florida Legislature to buy more land around Lake Okeechobee for water storage, but Governor Scott's administration came in and put an end to that idea.

So yeah, this might be Scott's fault, too.

Area residents say the algae smells so bad that they  have to stay indoors, and when they do go outside, some of them get watery eyes and respiratory problems.

Plus, wildlife is suffering, too, and some marine animals are probably dying because of the algae.

This kind of thing happens elsewhere due to poor pollution controls, mostly from agricultural, sewage treatment plant and industrial runoff.

There was a big algae bloom on Lake Erie last summer, which threatened Toledo, Ohio's drinking water supply.

Here where I live in Vermont, toxic and thick algae have lately made appearances in and around St. Albans Bay, which I  can see from my hillsice home, in the past few summers. That has caused swimming bans and warnings to keep children and pets away from the algae-slimed water.  It could hurt or kill them.

Of course, it's expensive to enact pollution controls that would prevent all this phosphorus and other bad stuff from getting into waters around Florida, the Great Lakes, Vermont and elsewhere.

But do we really want to spend our summers holding our noses and worried about our health because of all this algae in the water?

Heres an aerial view of the algae in Florida to give you an idea of the scope of the Algae From Hell



And he's a sad video of a manatee trapped in the algae goop and a family trying to hose it off to give it some relief. It's unclear if the manatee made it out of the algae and survived or not: