60-year-career: Chief has devoted a lifetime to MC Fire Department

Alvin Cockerham remembers the first big blaze he saw as a Morgan City rookie firefighter.
It was at the First Baptist Church on Federal Avenue. “It was gone by the time we got there,” Cockerham remembers.
He’s been fighting fires ever since. Except for a few months in the late 1960s, Cockerham, now 11 years into his second stint as fire chief, has been a Morgan City firefighter since 1966.
And at 81, he has no plans to quit.
“I’ve enjoyed this,” Cockerham said. “I’ve had good days and bad days. It can be frustrating. But it’s been good.”
A native of the Winnfield area, Cockerham graduated from high school in 1963. He drove trucks for a while before joining the Army.
He had finished training at Fort Polk and was bound for Texas to work on nuclear missiles when he learned his father died.
Cockerham left the service on a hardship discharge and began thinking about what he might do. He considered working offshore.
But an uncle, George Boudier, was an assistant fire chief in Morgan City. Boudier suggested to Cockerham that he should join the Fire Department here, and Cockerham liked what he saw.
“I like the atmosphere,” Cockerham said. “I like the city.”
He passed the Civil Service exam and went to work for $330 a month — “a lot more than hauling logs,” he said.
Cockerham worked his way through the ranks and, after 19 years, was appointed chief in 1985.
But he stepped down in 1989. He found frustration in the job.
Like local governments across Louisiana, Morgan City suffered economically during what would become known as the oil crunch, a long period of depressed oil prices and reduced city revenue.
The federal government also changed the rules for government worker hours. Cockerham thought the regulations made a poor fit for the shifts worked by firefighters and police officers. His frustration grew.
So he stepped down as chief and returned to firefighting duty as a captain while in his mid-40s.
Former Mayor Tim Matte was a City Council member during that time.
“There were a lot of years when he was senior to a lot of people in the department,” Matte said. “He was still doing the hard work, wearing a pack and running into buildings.”
Twenty-six years passed before he returned to the chief’s post, appointed by then-Mayor Frank “Boo” Grizzaffi in 2015 to succeed interim Chief Mark Stephens
Cockerham, at age 70, was chosen from among nine applicants.
“I’m fortunate to come in here with a bunch of great young men that want to learn and a bunch of experienced officers that know full well what they’re doing,” Cockerham said at the time. “So I’m inheriting a very, very good situation.”
“At that time,” Grizzaffi said in an interview this week, “he was the perfect man with the best experience.”
Cockerham had financial savvy to go with that experience, Grizzaffi said. “He’s a good combination of both.”
Along the way, Cockerham has had to learn how to lead firefighters, especially young firefighters. He imagined that his job would be to help them overcome their fear.
The opposite turned out to be true.
“We’ve always been an aggressive department,” Cockerham said. “We will go in. But you have to watch them.”
At the same time, “like the old chief said, you get them what they need and get the hell out of their way.”
Finding firefighters can be as challenging as leading them. In the post-COVID economy, recruitment became a big issue for both the Fire Department and the Police Department, and low pay was identified as the problem.
In 2023, Cockerham said he was sometimes forced to close a fire station when one firefighter was out sick or on vacation. Then-Police Chief James Blair said the attrition rate in his department was unsustainable.
Mayor Lee Dragna led an effort to impose a half-cent sales tax to raise police and firefighter pay. Voters passed the tax 87%-13% on April 29, 2023.
The raises that the tax funded were a help. But the department remains eight firefighters short of the full complement of 33.
Along with navigating personnel issues, Cockerham has managed to adapt to changing demands and changing technology.
He remembers the rescue van the Fire Department used when he started. “Mostly you just put them in and drove to the hospital,” Cockerham said.
Now some of his firefighters have emergency medical training.
They may also go into a fire wearing a breathing apparatus that will alert other firefighters when it remains motionless for too long, a sign the wearer may be injured. They may use a thermal imaging camera to find a fire in a smoky building.
It’s not a life he’s eager to give up.
“I’ll keep at it as long as I’ve got my health,” Cockerham said.