Breaking an eleven-month silence, the former superintendent of New Mexico’s Bandelier National Monument said the prescribed burn that got out of control and destroyed more than 200 homes in Los Alamos, New Mexico, last year was not the result of poor judgment and errors by National Park Service personnel.

Challenging a government report issued in the midst of last May’s devastating Cerro Grande fire—which burned 48,000 acres—Roy Weaver, who gave the final go-ahead to light the blaze, said the disaster was instead due to a series of mishaps beyond anyone’s ability to control.

“I don’t want to deny our responsibility for igniting the prescribed fire,” Weaver said. “But we did it with a plan that seemed valid and workable. Things happened that we couldn’t or didn’t anticipate. And that we couldn’t control.”

In his first detailed public statements since the fire, Weaver said that he and the Bandelier crew that planned and carried out the blaze had been unfairly scapegoated for the disaster. He said that neither he nor his people were warned ahead of time to not light the fire, as has been widely reported. He also said that other federal agencies bore a measure of responsibility. He cited the Santa Fe National Forest, which took nine hours to provide backup in the critical early stages of the fire. He also pointed to the National Weather Service, which did not provide a timely forecast of the high winds that hit the Los Alamos area at noon on Sunday, May 7, and transformed the fire into a raging inferno.

Weaver also criticized a government investigation that blamed the catastrophe on poor planning, preparation and execution by the park service. Weaver said the investigation—conducted in a matter of days while the Cerro Grande fire was still burning—was overly hasty and did not adequately explore what went wrong. He said the investigative report that was produced—and released to the media by former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt at a jam-packed press conference in Santa Fe—was distorted by the political need for Babbitt to take responsibility for the disaster.

He had a “desire to quickly get a report out to the public,” Weaver said.

Many observers believe Babbitt may also have been motivated by a desire to save the park service’s prescribed burning program, which for the past fifteen years has vigorously sought to restore fire to the forests of the West. “He wanted to attribute this to human error,” said Tim Ingalsbee of the Western Fire Ecology Center, an Oregon-based group.

Weaver’s comments come at a time when the release of another Cerro Grande report—this one by a park service board of inquiry looking into whether anyone should be punished—has been held up by the Interior Department. John Wright, an agency official, said in March that the report was being reviewed by the Bush administration.

The holdup has been interpreted by some as a sign that the report either fully or partially exonerates Weaver and his lieutenants. That possibility has already prompted angry letters from Los Alamos residents to the town’s local newspaper.

Weaver’s career does not hinge on the report, but, as he put it, “my reputation is at stake.” Weaver, a 33-year park service veteran, was put on leave after the fire got out of control. He subsequently retired—approximately a year before he had planned to.

The careers of Weaver’s subordinates, the people who designed and carried out the burn, are very much in the balance. They include Michael Powell, who was in charge of the burn in the field, and fire managers Charisse Sydoriak and Al King. The performance of Paul Gleason, a veteran park service firefighter who headed up the effort to extinguish the Cerro Grande fire in the days before it escaped into the surrounding forest, has also reportedly been under scrutiny.

Weaver remained silent for so long because he was concerned that anything he said publicly might negatively affect the board of inquiry investigation. But the price he’s had to pay is to silently seethe about what he considers to be a number of inaccuracies and misimpressions about the fire. In a wide-ranging interview, the soft-spoken, silver-haired Weaver issued the following rebuttals:

• The park service was not warned ahead of time to not ignite the prescribed burn.

Dick Burick, a Los Alamos National Laboratory official, told a congressional panel last June that he had pleaded with Bandelier management not to light the fire out of concern that forest conditions were too dry. Similarly, John Romero of the Santa Fe National Forest told the New Mexico media that he also had argued against setting the fire.

Weaver said both claims were false. He said that the Los Alamos laboratory, the Department of Energy and the Santa Fe National Forest all knew about the burn well in advance and that they were informed on the morning of May 4 that the fire was going to be lit later that day.

“No one told us not to light it,” Weaver said.

Weaver said another laboratory official, Gene Darling, did express concerns on the day the fire was lit—but not about the Cerro Grande burn. Weaver said Darling had questioned Bandelier personnel about another park service prescribed burn in a different area after that fire started burning hotter than anticipated.

Weaver said Romero did express concerns that the Cerro Grande fire was sending a mixed message to the public since the Santa Fe Forest had just decided to ban prescribed burns for the rest of the spring fire season. Weaver said that reservation was not expressed until the day after the Cerro Grande fire was lit.

• The park service was not warned by the National Weather Service that there would be high winds on Sunday, May 7.

Weaver said the weather service predicted that the winds on that fateful Sunday would be calmer than they had been the previous day. The result was that firefighters were caught off-guard when gusts from thirty-five to fifty miles an hour hit around noon. These winds caused the fire to flare up like a blowtorch.

• The park service did make arrangements for backup in the event that things went wrong.

In particular, Bandelier officials had received assurances from the Santa Fe National Forest that extra firefighters and equipment would be provided within ninety minutes to three hours.

Instead, in the critical early stages of the fire, it took the Santa Fe forest nine hours to provide a replacement crew after a Black Mesa firefighting crew from a nearby American Indian pueblo was sent home for poor performance. It took even longer for the agency to provide an aircraft to drop fire retardant.

These delays proved critical. According to Weaver, had the Santa Fe Hotshot firefighting crew arrived a couple of hours earlier than they did, it is likely they would have easily extinguished a small “slopover”—an isolated spot fire that erupted beyond the boundaries of the prescribed burn area. Instead, they were unable to put out the blaze and air support had to be called in to put it out.

As fire investigators concluded in a little-noticed appendix to the Babbitt report, the slopover, which occurred Friday, set the stage for the explosive fire that erupted two days later by drying out the forest. Moreover, after the fire was declared out of control, fire officials went on a fire suppression footing—which led to the setting of backfires to deprive the main fire of fuel.

Investigators said it was flames from these backfires that got out of control and burned into Los Alamos.