Park Official Who OKd Burn to Retire
The park superintendent who approved a prescribed burn that blew out of control and rolled through Los Alamos last month said Friday he will retire in July because of the controversy.
Roy Weaver, 60, superintendent of Bandelier National Monument for nearly 10 years, has taken responsibility for the decision to start the burn on May 4. He said he believed conditions had been just right for the park’s annual regimen of burning brush to stave off a potentially disastrous fire.
“I would approve a prescribed burn again,” Weaver said in a telephone interview with Associated Press from his home in White Rock near Los Alamos. “If I knew this would happen, I wouldn’t. But we made the best decision we could with the information we had at the time.”
After the burn was started, the humidity didn’t get as high as hoped and wind was higher than expected, gusting over 50 mph. It became the largest wildfire in state history, destroying more than 200 homes.
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