Tivoli firefighter Ervin Williams made an impassioned plea to the commissioners court Tuesday morning for a pumper truck capable of putting out house fires, following a blaze that destroyed the Tovar family home last Wednesday.

“If there had been kids in that house, there would have been no way to get those kids out,” Williams said.

The Tivoli volunteers attempted to quell the blaze with a brush truck but the hoses are not capable of delivering a stream of water necessary for house fires, Commissioner Rod Bernal said.

In June 2008, Judge Rene Mascorro brought a proposal to purchase a $250,000 pumper truck by financing it, but the proposal was rejected.

Commissioners Stanley Tuttle and Gary Bourland, along with former Commissioner Rindle Wilson, all agreed that the truck was necessary for Tivoli, which is unincorporated and falls under county jurisdiction, but none of them want to saddle the county with $250,000 of debt and $20,000 to $31,000 per-year payments.

“I don’t want to say I told you so,” Mascorro said Tuesday morning.

“We’re in the same situation we were three years ago,” he said. “Tivoli is isolated with no fire protection.”

The Refugio Fire Department was dispatched to Tivoli to fight the fire, but it took 45 minutes for them to get there, Williams said. Austwell firefighters arrived 10 minutes after Refugio.

“Every (precinct) except for Commissioner Bernal’s has a fire truck,” Williams said.

Bourland defended the commissioners’ decision in June 2006, saying that the commissioners’ proposal to purchase an old pumper from Woodsboro was rejected.

Tuttle said the previous request had “fallen through the cracks.”

But like Chief Arnulfo Perez’s rejection of the county’s proposal in 2006 to purchase a second-hand truck, Williams said no as well.

“We don’t want your problems and we don’t want somebody else’s problem,” Williams said.

The firefighter said old trucks have old pumps, which was the problem with the Woodsboro pumper.

Mascorro proposed to go out for bids again on a new, fully equipped fire truck.

“I’d rather have a new truck if my family and house were at risk,” Mascorro said.

In other action, the commissioners discussed the ban of aerial fireworks inside the county.

“Every year we do this,” the judge said.

Every year the ban is ignored, the commissioners agreed.

“There was a better show at the bowling alley than at the fairgrounds (on the Fourth of July),” Bourland said. “There’s no use passing it if it’s not going to be enforced.”

Chief Deputy Sheldon Wiginton said the situation at the bowling alley “became a riot,” with celebrators shooting a fireworks mortar round at the deputy.

The court defined aerial fireworks as anything with a stick or fin or that is catapulted more than three feet off the ground.