The natural gas that fuels his anxiety would come ashore about 2.5 miles from his four-bedroom home at the edge of a strawberry field. The pipeline would likely follow Hueneme Road, a half-mile from this South Oxnard neighborhood of working-class homeowners.

Still wearing his Sara Lee deliveryman's uniform and a Los Angeles Dodgers visor, De La Cerda may know more about plans for a new softball complex than about the liquefied natural gas that would be converted to gas at an offshore terminal and piped 21 miles across the seabed into Oxnard. But he has heard the talk of everything that could go wrong.

"We're the ones," he said, "who would die first."

For all the arguments about America's dwindling energy resources and the impact of tankers and pipelines on marine life, the fight against LNG orbits around disasters. People in Oxnard, Long Beach, Fall River, Mass., and the more than 30 other communities earmarked for LNG stations worry about spills that could start fires so hot people a mile from the source could blister from burns. They worry about tanker collisions. They worry about terrorists who look at an LNG terminal and visualize a bull's-eye.

Their fears focus not on what would happen but what could happen. Paul Chatman, the president of Ocean View School Board, lives a few blocks from De La Cerda and calls it the what-if game.

"We're hearing people say that 'Wow, this thing could explode. People could die. Our property values could drop,' " he said.

Some liken an LNG explosion to Hiroshima. Others steer away from apocalyptic scenarios but still maintain not enough is known about what happens when a liquefied gas that has to be kept at 260 degrees below zero leaks.

Experts who calculate the risks of accidents or attacks offer some assurances. They cite a December study from the U.S. Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories that refutes worst-case claims of a fire stretching far from the ocean into coastal communities. And though they contend shipping LNG bears risks and acknowledge the remote chance of vapor fires devastating a community, they stress terminals located several miles offshore like the two deep-water proposals near Ventura County carry minimal risks.

"The only reason these things become interesting for terrorists is if they kill a lot of people," said Richard Clarke, who advised four presidents on national security issues and was the White House counterterrorism expert during 9/11.

A fierce opponent of LNG stations planned for cities in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, Clarke flatly rejects claims that al-Qaida or any other terrorist group would target offshore terminals.

"Terrorists are not interested in blowing things up just because when you hit them, they explode," he said. "If something's offshore, it's just not going to be of interest."

Calculating the risks

In January 2004, explosions and fires killed 27 people and wounded 80 at an Algerian plant where natural gas is cooled into LNG. One of the plant's refrigeration units leaked either LNG or the flammable gas used to chill it, according to an analysis of the official accident report by Hazards Intelligence journal. That created a large vapor cloud ignited by a steam boiler.

U.S. LNG plant operators argue such a disaster couldn't happen at import facilities, including those proposed near Ventura County, because they use warm water to transform LNG back into gas. The Algeria plant used steam turbines to power its refrigeration process. The operators also blame the Algeria accident on inferior plant design.

But Jerry Havens, a chemical engineer from the University of Arkansas who has researched LNG safety since the 1970s, said Algeria raises the possibility certain chemical reactions can cause a vapor cloud to explode, rather than just burn.

"It blew things apart," he said. "What happened in Algeria is of direct relevance."

Sixty years earlier, LNG leaked from a cracked storage tank into the sewer system and streets of Cleveland. The vapors started a fire that killed 128 people. Investigators blame the deaths on the wartime steel shortage, which meant the storage tank was built with brittle metal. Such low-nickel steel is now banned at LNG facilities.

Both tragedies drive what-if speculation.

"LNG incinerated one square mile of Cleveland. That's a tremendous risk," said Tim Riley, an Oxnard lawyer helping to lead the national fight against LNG. "There's always going to be accidents. When that happens with one of these kind of facilities, it's catastrophic."

But the two disasters are the only large accidental spills and fires in more than 80 years of storing and transporting LNG, according to reviews of industry and insurance company records by numerous analysts, including the Congressional Research Service. Experts say the accidents don't provide enough data to scientifically gauge risks or consequences of a major spill at a contemporary U.S. terminal or on a tanker. Nor have there been large-scale simulations of ruptured tanks or vapor fires.

So experts rely on computer modeling to predict risks and acknowledge their calculations are only as accurate as the assumptions on which they are based.

"The studies that are out there now have holes big enough to drive Mack trucks through," said Eric Dawicki, an LNG security consultant who is president of the Northeast Maritime Institute in Fairhaven, Mass. Once a merchant marine officer who worked on LNG tankers, he contends the only way to address public fears is to take large amounts of liquefied gas into a desert and test what happens when vapor clouds burn.

"If we have the science to back up what the technicians already believe, then there is no longer a debate," he said. "It is imperative we remove the debate."

The tankers that Dawicki once helped pilot to places like Louisiana's bayou country and South Korea seem huge as they crawl through a harbor, dwarfing a security force that includes helicopters, Coast Guard cutters and tugboats. But at about 1,000 feet long and 150 feet wide, a typical tanker is no larger than most of the 5,000 merchant vessels that traverse the Santa Barbara Channel each year on the way to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

All tankers have double hulls and carry their LNG in insulated tanks that keep it cold enough to stay liquefied. One ship carries about 150,000 cubic meters of LNG, equal to about 3 billion cubic feet of gas. That's about 43 percent of California's daily gas consumption.

A tanker can lose its cargo by running aground and tearing itself open. It can collide with another vessel. It can be attacked by terrorists hoping to ignite the gas and touch off a devastating fire.

As a liquid, LNG doesn't explode or burn. But when it leaks, the fluid warms and vaporizes. Mixed with air in the proper ratio and then struck by a spark or flame, the vapor can burst into fire.

"It burns like a can of gasoline would burn," said mechanical engineer James Fay, who studies LNG safety and believes it's unlikely but not impossible the vapor cloud would explode. "It's just a fire. I say 'just.' It's a pretty big fire."

A shrinking danger zone

On the map shown by Donna Johnson as she sits in her living room, a fireball shaped like a winged serpent obliterates almost everything from Santa Barbara to Simi Valley. Much of Ventura County is gone save for a few areas that include land tucked behind the Conejo Grade.

"The only thing that's going to save Newbury Park is going around that mountain," Johnson said.

She's a school accounting clerk who is also neighborhood council president for Oxnard's Pleasant Valley Estates, meaning she worries about trash pickup, road repairs and the planned pipeline carrying LNG, already converted into its gas form, about a half-mile from her home. Some of her neighbors think the offshore terminals could bring jobs. Others said gas prices could fall. More than a few have never heard of liquefied natural gas and don't know what to think.

Johnson keeps a blue binder of documents that warn of LNG's dangers. She worries that if a tanker collided with another vessel or was attacked by terrorists, the fire could extend in any direction for more than 30 miles.

The theory has marked LNG fights since a failed attempt to build an onshore terminal at Oxnard's Ormond Beach in 1977. But last year's safety study from Sandia National Laboratories suggests the largest possible vapor fires could endanger people for a radius of just more than two miles.

Havens may be partly responsible for the 30-mile estimates. Back in the 1970s, he evaluated several LNG safety assessments for the U.S. Coast Guard and wrote a report outlining the vast range of opinions on the size of vapor fires, from less than one to mile to more than 50.

"I don't know if they read any further than that or not," Havens said, adding he believed at the time that the danger zone was 3 to 10 miles. And three decades of research later, he now agrees with the Sandia assessment and has difficulty imagining a scenario in which an offshore terminal could endanger a city like Oxnard. So does Fay, an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"There's just no way you can make the case that a fire or vapor cloud released by the ships is going to harm anyone on the shore," Fay said, emphasizing that such a fire at an onshore terminal could be horrific. "A mile away, you get second-degree burns within 30 seconds. You can't move anyone away from the fire. They just get exposed where they are."

The first U.S. LNG storage facility was built in 1912 in West Virginia and now 114 LNG facilities operate. Five are import terminals -- the type of stations proposed off Ventura County's coast -- and a station in Alaska exports LNG. Most of the rest are storage units.

But while LNG isn't new, the deepwater platform that BHP Billiton wants to build at sea 14 miles from the border of Ventura and Los Angeles counties is unique -- a structure as long as three football fields with tanks that could hold 72 million cubic meters of LNG. Environmentalists like Susan Jordan of the California Coastal Protection Network worry that unloading LNG from the tanker to the platform, from one moving object to another, could increase the chance of spills that may not jeopardize people ashore but could intrude on the nearby shipping lane.

"There's this knee-jerk reaction that throw it offshore and everything goes away," she said of safety concerns. "That's not true."

But LNG would be conveyed from the tanker to the platform through sealed connecting arms, said Kathi Hann of BHP Billiton, asserting the only chance of spill is through a ruptured tank -- same as onshore.

"The truth of it is this technology has been going on for decades," she said. "The only difference is the product is LNG and not oil."

Tankers have carried liquefied gas since 1959. Five ships have been in accidents at sea, including a crash three years ago between a ship named the Norman Lady and a U.S. Navy submarine, according to the environmental impact statement for the BHP Billiton platform. None resulted in injuries, fatalities or a spill. A study by University of Houston's Institute for Energy, Law and Enterprise concluded that a collision or grounding hasn't caused an LNG spill in about 40,000 voyages covering 60 million miles.

Ships in port have leaked small amounts of LNG a dozen times over the past 40 years. None caused fires and most occurred while the ships were loading or unloading, according to a 2003 survey by the Congressional Research Service.

When spills happen, tankers are equipped with automatic detection and shutoff systems as well as fire sensors and devices that snuff out flames with nitrogen.

But if the risk of a tanker accident is well understood and documented, the threat of terrorism is different.

Threat called real

People worried about attacks on LNG terminals or tankers point to the USS Cole, the guided missile destroyer rammed by a small boat full of explosives in an attack that killed 17 sailors. They refer to the June bombings in London's subways. More than anything else, they talk about Sept. 11, 2001.

"Whoever thought the World Trade Towers would come down?" Jordan said. "It hasn't happened before. That doesn't mean it couldn't happen."

The threat is real, agrees former White House terrorism adviser Clarke. Now a private consultant, he helped Rhode Island's attorney general craft a report asserting a planned LNG terminal in Providence could attract al-Qaida or possibly a homegrown terrorist group.

The report claimed an attack on a chemical or gas tanker was considered the sixth most likely doomsday scenario by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, asserting the government is expected to spend $1 billion to prevent such attacks.

Two months after publication, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected the Providence LNG site.

Before 9/11, tankers entering Boston Harbor were not escorted by the Coast Guard as they crawled past Logan International Airport and downtown Boston. Now, LNG deliveries through the same waters involve onboard inspections, screenings of tanker crews and a long line of security escorts including helicopters, Coast Guard cutters and tugboats. During terrorism alerts, scuba divers check piers for explosive devices.

Security at terminals off California's coast wouldn't be as dramatic. Tankers would have to give the Coast Guard four days notice before entering U.S. waters, providing information about crew members. Clarke questions whether any level of security could deter terrorists.

"What does anyone really think that a helicopter or a tugboat is going to do?" he said, outlining scenarios in which a small boat or plane barrels directly into a tanker. "They're not going to be able to stop it."

But he asserted the threat exists only when LNG terminals are built within a mile of populated areas. Asked to assess the terminals proposed off Ventura County's coast, he sees little danger because not enough people would be in the kill zone.

"There's no need to exaggerate this," he said. "It's bad enough without exaggerations."

Ready to move

Ventura County residents complained and worried and complained some more about the dangers of piping pressurized gas from an offshore terminal past residential areas, schools and hospitals. They even held hands along a possible route in a protest. And BHP Billiton and Southern California Gas Co. changed its proposed route.

Now, the 36-inch pipeline would follow Hueneme Road past Pleasant Valley Estates. It would cut through farm land before crossing Highway 101 and coming near an unincorporated community of houses, mobile homes and businesses known as Nyeland Acres. That's where Carolyn Bernard is buried in dog hair on a sunny July afternoon in the Canine Styling Salon that she's run for 15 years.

Ask about liquefied natural gas and her shoulders shrug.

"I have no idea what it is," she said.

Tell her it's fuel that would be converted into its gas form and piped underground not far from her business.

"Ex-cuuuse me!" she said, voice rising. "I'm not so sure that's such a good thing."

The more she hears, the less confident she becomes. She worries about the company's safety assurances -- "That's when you have a problem" -- and pipelines rupturing, though she knows other pipes carrying gas already burrow in the ground nearby.

Finally, she turned to her visitor.

"Where can I move?"

Pipes become corroded and leak. Construction workers slice into them with backhoes and bulldozers. Cars veer from the road and snap them off. Earthquakes and landslides sever them. A Washington, D.C., area gas company blamed an increase in pipe leaks to differences in the composition of liquefied natural gas.

Safety experts and even some environmentalists fighting LNG terminals don't dispute the possibility of leaks but also point out that networks of pipelines already exist.

According to the Office of Pipeline Safety, more than 292,000 miles of major transmission and distribution pipelines crisscross the United States, carrying gas across state lines or from region to region. Southern California Gas Co. operates about 95,000 miles of pipeline, including a 30-inch transmission line near Ormond Beach, close to the size of lines in the same area that would carry gas from the LNG terminals.

The numbers don't provide much comfort near the end of the proposed pipeline, which also happens to be the home of Mesa Union Elementary School, attended by more than 560 students grades kindergarten through eight.

The school has been at this Somis site, flanked by lemon groves and Highway 118, since 1937. Superintendent John Puglisi is working with BHP Billiton representatives to move the pipeline farther away from its planned path across the road that serves as the school's driveway.

He worries because LNG poses one more possibility that bad things could happen. Other pipelines already come near but Puglisi argues the existence of risk is no reason to increase it.

He voices the argument heard all along the proposed pipeline: Eliminating the possibility of danger is better than allowing even a remote chance of an accident.

"Not in my back yard definitely comes up," he said.

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