The state Department of Natural Resources says the nation’s largest oil-by-rail terminal, proposed at the Port of Vancouver, should be denied state approval — and Clark County has raised its own issues with the proposal.

In filings made with the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council that The Columbian obtained Wednesday, DNR managers said the terminal and its daily oil train traffic would increase the risk of wildfire along hundreds of miles of track, something state firefighters “are not prepared to address.”

“Because of the potential for tremendous catastrophic loss associated with shipment of crude-by-rail, and the difficulty in adequately assessing the frequency at which disasters will occur,” reads the filing signed by Assistant Attorney General Terence Pruit, “(the council) cannot meet its obligations to assure the public that the proposal contains adequate safeguards for public welfare and protection and to ensure the proposal will have minimal adverse environmental consequences.”

Clark County Deputy Prosecutor Taylor Hallvik, meanwhile, wrote in a similar filing that the terminal presents “unacceptable risks to the health and safety of the Jail Work Center population,” which is near where the terminal would be built. The county did not ask for denial, saying that it believes “complete mitigation of these significant risks is possible through a Tesoro-Savage funded relocation of the JWC to a location that is not surrounded by a crude oil terminal.”

Vancouver Energy, a joint venture of Tesoro Corp. and Savage Cos., proposes to receive up to 360,000 barrels of crude oil by rail per day and ship it via the Columbia River to West Coast refineries. About four trains of 120 cars each would serve the terminal daily traveling mostly from North Dakota through the Columbia River Gorge.