A trainload of treated sewage sludge from New York City has been parked in an Alabama town for two months — and the locals are not happy about it, saying it has been ruining their quality of life.

"When you have that amount of material in such a small town, it makes an impact — and it's not a good one," said Heather Hall, the mayor of Parrish, Alabama.

That material is bio-waste — residue from New York City's sewage treatment process.

Hall told me that a trainload of it has been sitting in Parrish, a town of two-square miles and 982 residents, for two months.

"It's really been hard on the people in Parrish because when you get off work at night, you can't go outside, you can't go barbecue, and then on the weekends you can't go do anything, especially if it's real warm," Hall said.

She says some residents live no more than 50 yards from the train, and that baseball games at a nearby ballfield had to be moved or rescheduled because of the odor.

The waste is not actual sewage or feces. Its technical name is "dewatered sludge." It's what's left after a complicated treatment process in New York breaks down the raw waste. The city ships it to Alabama, where inexpensive land and permissive zoning allow for its disposal.

This load was headed for a landfill operated by Big Sky Environmental not too far away. The train ended up parked in Parrish after another nearby town went to court to prevent the train's passage.

Parrish's mayor says there was nothing she could do to force the train to leave.

"So there's no regulations for this, and that's one of the reasons this was allowed to happen," Hall said.

Records at the Alabama Department of Environmental Management show Big Sky Environmental collects the "dewatered sludge" from at least six treatment plants across New York City. A department spokesman compared the material to fertilizer.

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection could not immediately confirm how many trainloads of sludge have been transported south, but it said it temporarily halted the shipments.

As for the train load in Parrish, the mayor says Big Sky removed all of the 252 containers of bio-waste by truck. The last load left Tuesday.

The mayor says she is looking into zoning laws to prevent what critics misleadingly call the "poop train" from parking in her town again.

"That's something we're going to have to look into, and to protect the people of Parrish, it's something we are going to have to do," Hall said.