Prospective rail strike may leave millions of pounds of feces in New York City

A prospective national railway strike could halt the trains that transport human waste out of New York City, leaving residents of the Big Apple stuck with the roughly 2.4 million pounds of excrement they produce each day.

Members of the nation's largest union of rail workers on Monday rejected a contract with major railroads, paving the way for a strike in the coming weeks.

Under normal circumstances, New York City's human waste would enter landfills spread across the Southern United States via train, the Daily Wire noted. Federal law prohibits the city from dumping its fecal matter in the ocean. Without running trains, the waste would remain in the city, presenting a significant threat to public health.

New York authorities assured the public that the city was preparing for such a scenario, but cautioned that a sustained delay in the city's poop disposal would be disastrous.

New York City Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch told The Daily Beast that "We are working closely with our contracted vendors and are prepared to do all that we can in a worst-case scenario, but let me be clear: a prolonged disruption of the rail network for trash removal represents a very real threat to public health and safety in the City of New York."

Congress is currently out of session due to the Thanksgiving holiday, but will likely attempt to intervene in negotiations to halt a strike and the potential ramifications of the idle feces transports.