LAFAYETTE, La. (AP) - The Bourgeois family in Carencro has made helping people a tradition. With at least 10 first-responders spanning two generations, public service seems to run in their blood.
“We’ve always been emergency personnel,” said Blake Bourgeois, 29, an engineer/driver with the Lafayette Fire Department.
Blake is one of at least seven of his family members who work at LFD.
“I’m kinda losing track,” he said.
Two of his uncles have been with the department for decades. Jim, 52, said he’s nearing retirement after 26 years with LFD, and his brother John, 53, has been deputy chief for the past year. He’s not ready to give it up yet.
They each have sons in the department now, too. John’s son Michael, 27, became a firefighter in May, and Jim works at the same station as his son, Jeff.
The eldest Bourgeois sibling, Jack Sr., went into law enforcement like their dad, joining the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office in the 1980s. He retired in 2018 after more than 30 years as a deputy.
Two of his children followed in his footsteps, with daughter Madison joining LPSO and Jack Jr. now a detective with the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Office.
His twin sons, Jacob and Joshua, are firefighters with LFD, as is their cousin Blake, rounding out the family affair.
’IT’S IN OUR NATURE TO HELP PEOPLE’
Many of them credit their desire to become a first-responder to seeing their elders enjoy it and the stability it provided them. Plus, the aspects of the job fit their nature, John said.
“We are not inside people,” he said. “You get to work with your hands and come up with a plan of action to help people have a better outcome.”
He and his siblings grew up in the country on a farm in Carencro.
“It’s in our nature to be able to help people,” Jack said. “There’s nothing better than being a public servant.”
Like his kin, Jeff loves a lot of parts of the job, from the friends he’s made to the fast-paced dynamic. But the best part is “the gratitude from people, if you saved their house or you saved their husband,” he said.
“People call you at their worst time and you go try to solve their problem,” Michael said. “It’s about helping people.”
Cherrie Bourgeois, their mom or “Memaw,” said she isn’t surprised so many of her family members chose to do this work. She said she always tried to instill a good work ethic and the need to help others in her children and grandchildren.
“I’m just so proud of all of them,” she said. “They were all hard workers. They’re just good people. … My daughter said she’s so proud of her son, and I told her, ‘Just think how I feel!‘”
THE PEOPLE ‘BECOME YOUR FAMILY,’ TOO
The family atmosphere extends to others at work, whether or not they’re a Bourgeois.
“Everybody’s family,” Jack said about his fellow deputies. “That’s your work family. I was closer to them than some of my wives.”
Jack, 55, worked full time for the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office from 1986 to 2018, after two years of part-time work as a reserve officer. He started the reserve work while “a young guy working in the oil field” and “found something I loved to do.”
He loved it so much that he took the pay cut and switched from oil and gas to law enforcement full time.
“I enjoyed working,” Jack said. “I was married four times in my career. I wanted to be at work more than I wanted to be home. Everybody had each other’s backs.”
John said the fire department was just as close.
“You get close,” said Jim, now a captain with LFD. “They become your family.”
A lot of that takes place around the dinner table at the station, John said.
“The dinner table is like the table where you talk about everything,” John said. “You eat together, you talk about things. There’s a lot of problems solved at the dinner table.”
John became a firefighter in 1987 just after graduating from Carencro High School. He can remember strapping in on a tail board on the back of a truck to respond to calls during his first years.
“You would strap in on the old red trucks and hang on for dear life,” he described. “It’s much safer now.”
He and his brother have seen technology and even pay improve over the years, they said. But some things have stayed the same, which allows them to help the newbies like their mentors helped them.
“I’ve had the same issues they’ve had,” John said. “I can relate to everybody’s job because I’ve done it. I work for them. They don’t work for me. My job is to equip them. Their job is to go do the dangerous stuff.”
He said he’s worked under a lot of good mentors and tries to be the same, sharing what he’s learned over 34 years on the job.
“When you’re young, you have tunnel vision. You want to run in,” John said. “But you have to slow down and make good decisions. Everything we do is a concerted team effort. It’s orchestrated chaos. We try to remain under control.”
There’s also the hard things they see and the danger they face responding to fires and other emergencies. They learn to work through it together.
“Anybody who tells you they’re not scared is lying,” John said. “There are choices you have to make, calculated risks.
“In my career, I’ve only pulled out one person from house. There was heavy smoke, low visibility. He didn’t survive. It kinda sticks with you - ‘what could I have done differently?’ We all go through that.”
NEW BLOOD INSPIRED TO JOIN THE RANKS
Blake, 29, has been with the Lafayette Fire Department with his uncles and cousins since 2010.
“It’s a very fun, fulfilling job,” Blake said. “It’s never the same. There’s always something different. That makes it interesting.”
He said he’s really happy to go to work every day, but that takes the right mindset, he said. When there’s an emergency it’s their job to “do everything we can to make everything better,” and the outcome is not always what they hope.
The hardest part of the job, he said, is “not taking everything you see there home.”
“Some days it’s a beautiful thing,” he said. “Some days it’s really horrible.”
John’s son Michael joined the fire department in May after graduating from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette with a degree in industrial technology.
“He wanted to be a firefighter out of high school,” John said. “I said, ‘Do me a favor; go to school first.’”
He did just that and still wanted to be a firefighter.
“I like that not every day’s the same,” Michael said. “I like to work with my hands. Every time a call comes in, it’s a different situation, a different problem to solve.”
They don’t always see each other at work, though. Michael said most of them are at separate stations and on separate crews.
“The only time we see each other is if we go to the same fire call,” Michael said. “I’m not with them every day. It just depends on the call.”
Jeff, 31, admits he felt a little pushed into the fire service life, not because anyone told him to do that with his life but rather because it was what he saw growing up with his dad and uncle.
“I’ve been around it all my life,” Jeff said. “I thought it would be cool, I tried it and it’s where I want to be.”
And he means that long-term.
“I’m going to retire from the fire department,” he said.
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