(The Buffalo News posted the following story by Michael Beebe on its website on July 11.)
BUFFALO, N.Y. — A landfill outside New York State has agreed to take Buffalo’s garbage train – the 400 rail cars filled with New York City garbage that has been rotting in an East Side rail yard since February.
Details on when and where the 40 million pounds of waste will move, however, could not be determined because of a judge’s gag order.
State Supreme Court Justice Patrick H. NeMoyer declined to comment when asked why he ordered silence from the attorneys for the state and city who brought the lawsuit, as well as the companies involved in bringing the garbage here.
One source involved in the operation said the inspections and spraying are being done as part of the agreement to move the cars sometime between next week and the end of the month.
Others in the case said NeMoyer imposed the silence because of concern that news would leak out about which landfill has agreed to accept the garbage and the rail route that it would take.
The concern apparently is that the landfill and the rail company whose lines the train will use would back out if the details were publicized.
“How about us?” said Mary Taber, a neighborhood resident who helped form the Bailey-Clinton Community Association to protest the illegal garbage storage. “I can tell you this neighborhood has reached the limit of its patience. It perturbs us that a business can get a gag order when it’s our life.”
Common Council Member David A. Franczyk, whose Fillmore District includes the rail yard in the Bailey-Clinton area and who has been active trying to get rid of the garbage, said he also has been unable to learn what is happening with the train.
Other sources told The Buffalo News that Canadian Pacific Railway, whose rail lines were used to ship the garbage here, and Annexus Storage & Containers, which owns the rail cars holding the garbage, have found a landfill out of state willing to accept the garbage train.
A visit to the SK Rail Yard on Thursday showed that workers were spraying the cars, and neighbors reported seeing men inspecting the rail cars and the tarpaulins that cover them.
Taber said she and her neighbors have heard for two months that the cars would be moved in the next seven to 10 days.
“We’ve been more than cooperative with these folks,” she said. The end also cannot come soon enough for the businesses that abut the rail property.
“This has been the damnedest experience,” said Jay Wattles, who owns a business at the nearby Niagara Frontier Food Terminal. “It is unbelievable that it was allowed to happen.”
Although prevailing westerly winds generally keep the odor blowing away from the businesses and residents, the rotting garbage has brought growing infestations of fruit flies.
A printing company nearby said that it has had problems with the flies in its press, a paper company has complained of the flies fouling its stock, and food brokers at the terminal say they had to step up spraying. The case before NeMoyer is actually two actions, one brought by the city and the other by the state attorney general’s office.
The main target of both suits, Chem-Rail Logistics, is not involved in the efforts to clean up the mess. Its owner, Robert B. Ferro, who has a record of failed projects in the waste business, threatened legal action against Canadian Pacific and Annexus in April, telling them that the garbage was his property.
Ferro has not returned telephone calls seeking comment.
Chem-Rail began the garbage operation in August. The company was paid to dispose of the waste, leased the rail cars, shipped the garbage here, hired a local company – Express Intermodal Service – to transfer it, and then hauled by truck to Modern Landfill in Lewiston.
The operation began to unravel after neighbors complained of hundreds of big garbage trucks rumbling through their neighborhoods each day, and state police began ticketing the trucks for being overweight.
It came to a stop in February after Modern barred Chem-Rail’s garbage trucks because the bill was not paid.