The Roanoke Times | File November

Cumberland Park is seen from the air in November. Riverview Campground is to the left of the site, and U.S. 460 runs above it.

The Roanoke Times | File August

Damon Strickland is reflected in the head lamp of a moped as he gets ready to ride Monday. Strickland is the owner of Campus Cruizers, a moped and moped accessories shop in Blacksburg.

NARROWS -- Coal ash is back in the news.

If James McGrath, president of the Concerned Citizens of Giles County, has anything to say about it, one particular pile of coal ash is going to be in the news for a good long while.

More than a billion gallons of coal ash broke through an earthen dam at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee on Dec. 22.

That was three days after the Concerned Citizens and 38 other groups sent a letter to president-elect Barrack Obama asking for stricter rules for storing the 129 million tons of coal ash power plants generate every year. The sludge spill near Kingston has covered hundreds of acres, destroyed at least three houses and contaminated two rivers.

People living nearby have been told to stop using their wells, to keep their pets inside as much as possible and to avoid walking through the ash.

McGrath is concerned about another pile of coal ash, one growing on the edge of Narrows.

Tennessee and Narrows projects very different

The Cumberland Park project plans to put 254,000 cubic yards of ash in the 100-year flood plain along the New River. That's three years' of ash from Appalachian Power's coal-fired Glen Lyn electric generating plant. It's enough to raise roughly seven acres of riverbank by about 30 feet, making it even with U.S. 460.

There are differences between the Kingston ash and the Narrows ash.

"That's completely apples and oranges," said Joe Ryder, environmental compliance officer at the Glen Lyn power plant.

The Kingston ash was stored wet, in big ponds. The Narrows ash is sprayed with water to keep it from blowing out of the dump trucks that haul it the eight miles from Glen Lyn to Narrows, and there's a system set up to wet it at the site. But it's never in the slurry-like state of the pond ash.

The aim is to compact the ash so it can become a building site. The steel-reinforced earthen walls are meant to keep water out of the ash, not to hold ash slurry in.

William Hopkins, a Virginia Tech professor who has studied coal ash's effects for more than a decade, called the storage methods used in Tennessee "a worst case scenario," particularly since the ponds are beside a river.

"The circumstances in Tennessee represent an extreme example of why these materials should not be disposed of in or near floodplain habitats," Hopkins said.

Both the coal ash slurry that's flowed into the Emory Rivers and the coal ash on the banks of the New River contain a variety of toxic components -- arsenic, lead, mercury, and others -- that can damage kidneys, brains and nervous systems and cause cancer.

That's why McGrath and his organization want to keep the Narrows project in the public eye.

They've been doing a lot of research, and they've found some things they want to know more about.

When county officials knew about the project, how they decided to support it and why they backed what's described in many documents as a commercial development on a site zoned for industrial use are among the questions McGrath plans to ask at the county supervisors' meeting on Jan. 8.

Narrows project has some in W.Va. concerned

McGrath has already stirred up interest downstream.

Anna Ziegler is a lawyer, a member of the board of directors of the National Committee for the New River and a resident of Hinton, W.Va., where anything that gets into the river around Narrows will likely end up.

"More or less its final resting place is going to be behind Bluestone Dam in Hinton," Zielger said. "That's where our drinking water comes from."

When Appalachian Power brought in experts to explain why Cumberland Park is a good idea, they said that all the studies of the harm ash can do were conducted in lakes and ponds. The flow of the New River would dilute anything that might escape from Cumberland Park, they said.

They didn't seem to know that Bluestone Lake is 20 miles away as the crow flies.

Danny Melvin manages Riverview Campground next door to Cumberland Park. Rainwater running off the site flooded the campground in July. He's wondering, since the ash at one end of the site is already higher than the highway, if it might get developed first.

"It wouldn't surprise me that they don't put the convenience center there," Melvin said. By convenience center, he means a place for Dumpsters, where county residents can put their trash.

Ryder said that's not likely.

"It'll probably be all one shot, I think, when it's developed," he said.

Ryder also said the drainage system that wasn't finished when Riverview Campground got flooded is finished now.

"Of course, I don't think that was the cause of that flood at that particular time," Ryder said. "I never did agree with that assessment."

Nevertheless, he said, "everything worked beautifully" during a recent heavy rain.

"You know, engineering really does work," Ryder said. "I have to say everything is functioning as designed."

The part of Cumberland Park where the ash is already highway high has a liner under it, though it wasn't originally designed that way. The liner was added when water began seeping into the site.

Though they aren't required, Appalachian Power put in test wells to monitor for migration of toxins from the site. In March, Appalachian Power pointed to a Chesapeake golf course as an example of how using ash as construction fill can work.

Testing there has shown some leaching into nearby wells and the city is conducting a study of how it can provide water to affected homes. Dominion Power, the company that produced the ash, has agreed to give $6 million toward the project, according to Chesapeake spokeswoman Mary Ann Saunders.

The results of the first tests at Cumberland Park are being put together now, Ryder said.

"We don't have a problem making that public, if we've got a problem," he said. "We certainly don't anticipate any problem."

Ryder also said he doesn't think the Concerned Citizens will believe the test results anyway.

He's probably right about that. The group has put in test wells of its own.