A chorus of hundreds on Tuesday sang familiar but very different refrains on the oil terminal proposed for the Port of Vancouver.

It’s an economic bounty.

It’s an environmental disaster.

We can do this safely.

We can’t do this safely.

Their discordant voices echoed throughout the enormous Hall B at the Clark County Event Center at the Fairgrounds. State and local representatives who will play a large role in determining the fate of what would be the nation’s largest oil transfer terminal listened on as the voices continued through the afternoon and late into the evening. More than two years after the Port of Vancouver commission unanimously approved the project, the rhetoric for and against the project remained as heated as ever.

“The likelihood of a catastrophe becomes not a probability but an eventuality,” Russell Freeman told members of the state’s Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, which is performing an environmental review of the rail-to-marine oil terminal slated to handle 360,000 barrels of oil per day.

“If it can’t be done safely, then it won’t be built. We live by the same standards. This project will provide jobs, good-paying jobs,” Mark Holtz said in support of the project that would be built by Vancouver Energy, a joint venture between Tesoro Corp. and Savage Cos.

Nearly 400 people signed up to testify at the first of two Vancouver hearings. Terminal opponents hailing from throughout the Northwest vastly outnumbered supporters at Tuesday’s hearing as the terminal, first proposed in 2013, reached a major milestone. Once the evaluation council finishes its environmental review, likely later this year, it will make a recommendation to Gov. Jay Inslee, who gets final say over the project.