  We study the effects of quenched extended impurities on nonequilibrium phase
transitions in the directed percolation universality class. We show that these
impurities have a dramatic effect: they completely destroy the sharp phase
transition by smearing. This is caused by rare strongly coupled spatial regions
which can undergo the phase transition independently from the bulk system. We
use extremal statistics to determine the stationary state as well as the
dynamics in the tail of the smeared transition, and we illustrate the results
by computer simulations.
