“No one told us it was gridlock in the city,” says fired EMA director Robert J. Warren. Journal file photo

SOUTH KINGSTOWN — Robert J. Warren, the fired executive director of the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency, said Wednesday that he was being used as a “scapegoat” for the widespread problems in the response to last Thursday’s storm.

Warren defended his actions during the storm. No municipalities or state agencies requested the state EMA’s help, Warren said, including Providence, where gridlock was the worst and more than 100 schoolchildren were stranded for hours on school buses. He said that without the governor’s declaration of an emergency, his agency cannot force the municipalities to accept help.

With Governor Carcieri out of the country, Maj. Gen. Robert T. Bray, head of the state National Guard, was in charge. Bray, whom Carcieri has made head of the state EMA for now, had called out sick the day of the storm, which was not revealed until Wednesday. When Bray was asked Tuesday about where he was during the storm, the general said, “I was in an advisory role.”

On Wednesday, in a three-hour interview at his South Kingstown home, Warren said his firing was a result of his Tuesday morning interview on the John DePetro Show on WPRO (630-AM). During the radio interview, given with Bray’s approval, Warren stumbled in trying to explain his actions during the storm, which left thousands of motorists in gridlock for hours.

Warren said he gave the interview on little sleep — after responding to two major winter storms, a plane accident at T.F. Green Airport, and a work session Monday with the governor to review Thursday’s storm response.

He said that he thought he was going on a news program. He didn’t realize until he took the call that it was DePetro. Under the talk-show host’s hammering, Warren sounded beaten. “I’m not a politician,” he said Wednesday. “I’m a fireman.”

Tuesday, he learned quickly that the governor was upset about the interview. By afternoon, Bray told him not to come to an EMA meeting. Warren learned later that his name was taken off the agenda. “That’s when I knew,” he said.

Bray told reporters at the meeting that Warren was working in his office “on the very issues we’re discussing.” Bray returned to the Command Readiness Center in Cranston and fired Warren. Said Warren: Bray “said the governor didn’t want me to be the EMA director any more, and most of it was over the [WPRO] interview.”

Warren said the governor never spoke to him. The next morning, Carcieri went on WHJJ (920-AM) and told talk-show listeners that he fired Warren over his job performance during the storm.

As Warren stood disheartened in the kitchen of his house by Narrow River, the phone rang repeatedly. Several public safety officials left phone messages of dismay at his firing.

Warren sifted through cell phone records and a timeline of his actions during the storm, along with a stack of papers of school closings and weather service reports that his department had e-mailed and faxed to local officials that day.

“I think it was a New England snowstorm and I think we thought we’d given people enough time to get home,” Warren said. “But no one told us it was gridlock in the city.”

ON THE DAY of the storm, Warren began work at 8 a.m. The EMA had been sending out weather notifications to all communities, warning them of heavy snow and limited visibility during the afternoon rush hour. “Any travel should be completed by noon,” one advisory said.

Warren said he was in contact with the state police, but got no response from the state Department of Transportation. He told the chiefs of staff for the lieutenant governor and governor that no communities had reported problems.

Warren left the Cranston office twice. At 1 p.m., he went to get wiper blades and check road conditions. At 5, he went home to shovel so his longtime girlfriend, a nurse on-call at Kent Hospital and who could not shovel because of health reasons, could get out for work. Warren steered clear of Route 95 until he had passed the Warwick malls on Route 2.

His cell phone records while he was out of the office showed he had called the state police, the DOT, and spoke with the chiefs of staff for the governor and lieutenant governor. He returned to the EMA around 7:45 p.m., where he and a small number of EMA staff and senior National Guard officials monitored the storm until about midnight. Most of the Guard had left at 3 p.m., and nearly all the governor’s staff left between 5 and 6 p.m.

Bray was home and communicating with Warren by phone and e-mail throughout the day. “The governor is satisfied that given his illness, General Bray took the steps that he could,” said Jeff Neal, the governor’s spokesman.

Bray, a South Dakota native appointed in February 2006 by Carcieri to the $94,769-a-year job, did not call a news conference to inform the public of the problems, although the governor said on Monday that Bray was responsible for doing that. Bray declined to activate the Emergency Operations Center. Warren said that the EOC wasn’t needed because no communities were seeking assistance.

In Providence, where officials were learning during the evening they had 60 school buses stranded, neither local EMA Director Leo Messier nor Mayor David N. Cicilline called the state EMA. Cicilline said yesterday he didn’t need the state’s help.

It wasn’t until 9 p.m., when an irate grandfather left a message that his grandchild had been on a bus in Providence since 2 p.m. that Warren learned about the busing crisis, he said. He called the Providence police dispatch and was told that officers had found other stranded school buses. He called Messier, who told him that the children were warm on the buses and would get home eventually.

“I told Leo, ‘We can set up a joint operations center with the Providence police,’ ” Warren said Wednesday. “ ‘We’ll get them state DOT plows and private plows to get to them, and if we need to, we’ll walk in and get these kids and get them to a warm place and feed them.’ ”

Messier declined the offer. Warren said he then called his brother, Tom Warren, an assistant fire chief in Providence, for firefighters to help. Yesterday, Cicilline fired Messier.

WARREN WAS appointed in August 2005 to head what had long been a backwater of state government. Since then, the state EMA wrote new emergency plans, set up evacuation routes, and is finishing a statewide interoperable radio communications system. Warren also has become known regionally and nationally in emergency management circles, where he is working on solving disasters on a greater scale.

On Wednesday, standing in his home decorated for Christmas, Warren said he worked to professionalize the state EMA and to help the local directors, most of whom are volunteers or part-timers, obtain more federal money and develop their emergency plans.

“I like public service. I enjoy it. I think it’s my forte,” said Warren, a former chief and 27-year-veteran of the Cranston Fire Department. “But we’ll see. That avenue may not be open to me anymore.”

amilkovi@projo.com