PEARISBURG -- At a meeting that drew more than 100 people to Giles County High School Tuesday night, Virginia Tech professor William Hopkins said he's concerned about a plan to use power plant waste to create a building site beside the New River in Narrows.

"When these waste products are placed in environments where there is a high risk of them coming in contact with water," Hopkins said, "bad things can happen."

The meeting was organized by Concerned Citizens of Giles County, a group worried by the plan to use coal combustion byproducts as fill material in a flood plain. CCB is ash that's left after coal is burned. It contains varying amounts of toxins, including arsenic and lead.

American Electric Power owns the power plant that produces the ash. The Giles County Partnership for Excellence, a nonprofit formed to improve education in the county, owns the land next to the river -- a parcel that's already zoned for the proposed use. Draper Aden Associates is the project's engineering firm. All were invited to the meeting. None of them attended, although project supporters have said the plan is sound and that it will provide a beneficial project in the county. It could eventually provide jobs, and any revenue the partnership derives would be allocated to education, they say.

During Tuesday's meeting, the opposition group heard from Barbara Diess, a Pennsylvania woman whose neighborhood was flooded with toxic waste when CCB used in highway construction collapsed; Karita Knisely, who fought an AEP plan to spread CCB along New River Trail State Park; George Santucci, executive director of the National Committee for the New River; and Hopkins.

Hopkins has spent more than a decade studying the effects of CCB-contaminated water on fish, birds and reptiles. He showed slides of deformed fish and tadpoles. He told of a North Carolina lake where 18 of 20 fish species were exterminated by contamination.

"It can affect their feeding. It can affect their growth. It can affect their locomotion. It can affect how they interact with other animals in their environment," Hopkins said of the animals he's studied.

It can also affect drinking water. There are 24 proven cases of damage caused by CCB contamination, he said. More than 60 are under investigation. The link among them, he said, is contact with water. That's how toxins in the ash enter the surrounding environment.

That's why putting CCB in a flood plain is such a bad idea, according to Hopkins. It may be legal, he said, but that doesn't automatically mean it's right, ethical or safe.

Diess, of Forward Township, Pa., said she learned about the dangers of mixing CCB and water in January 2005 when she heard the sound of water rushing down the creek by her house.

"I didn't see it right away because it took quite awhile to get down to where I could see it," she said.

A water main, corroded by CCB used in road construction, had ruptured. A slurry of waste flowed through Diess' neighborhood, leaving piles of tree trunks and a dark coating of muck 8 inches thick. In places, it was much deeper than that, she said.

She described a boot-sucking mess that dried into windblown blown dust and froze into a hardened mass that had to be chipped away from tires before cars could move.

Diess showed photos of ash still scattered on the ground and said arsenic has leached 6 inches into the soil.

The site at Narrows would have an earthen berm 2 feet above the flood plain. The ash would be piled and compacted about 15 feet higher than the berm.

"I think folks in New Orleans would probably tell us an earthen berm won't hold water back forever," said George Santucci.

The CCB has to go somewhere, Santucci said, but not here.

"This is only going to be stopped if enough responsible citizens say this is not right," he said. "We don't want this junk in our flood plain. We don't want this junk in our river."

The DEQ's deadline for approving the project is 22 days away. The citizens' groups wants a moratorium on the project so the public can learn more about it.