The tipping point, according to Aaron Lipski, was the Molson Coors shooting. On Feb. 26, 2020, Lipski, then assistant chief of the Milwaukee Fire Department, was in a Wauwatosa fire station, meeting with firefighters from around the region in preparation for the Democratic National Convention, when a radio on one of their belts went off.
Lipski heard the words “active shooter,” checked his phone, and knew he had to get out of that meeting immediately.
A three-minute drive down State Street, sirens blaring, and he was on the scene at the brewery headquarters, where an employee had just opened fire, killing five of his co-workers and then himself.
“The tragedy just unfolds in front of your eyes,” Lipski remembers. That night, after hours on the scene with the police and FBI, he started to drive home and realized that he was shaking. He called his wife to tell her he would be late and rerouted to a nearby fire station, where another firefighter and friend who’d been on the scene was spending the night.
“I just sat in the firehouse kitchen for an hour and a half,” Lipski says. “They had some baked chicken thrown together. That was so appreciated – being able to just sit there with someone else who was there, someone who gets it.”
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Lipski knows there aren’t many people who “get it,” who are first on the scene at shootings and apartment fires and car crashes and heart attacks, who spend nights bunked up with a dozen others at their station waiting for the next alarm, who accept that death and danger are part of their work week.
Four years since that day, Lipski is now the fire chief, leading those men and women through one of the most difficult periods in the MFD’s history, with a department near its breaking point, with more emergencies and fewer firefighters to meet them.
“This is an honorable, difficult profession,” he says. “Our firefighters, the paramedics, their lieutenants and captains, there’s a sense of pride. … But they’re also weary and exhausted right now.”
THE MOLSON COORS shooting was an extraordinary event, one Lipski knew he’d never forget, but he didn’t realize that it was going to kick off an extraordinary year.
Only a month later, on March 25, Gov. Tony Evers issued the “Safer at Home” order, shuttering businesses across the state and asking Wisconsinites to remain indoors to combat the spread of COVID-19.
“Everything from there, it just seemed like the system had trouble keeping up and figuring it out,” Lipski says.
MFD was sending out firefighters (suited up in increased protective gear and masks) on additional calls to respond to people with COVID symptoms. And in 2021, Midwest Medical Transport Co., a private ambulance company that had handled much of the Northwest Side, abruptly ended its work with the city, leaving thousands more paramedic calls for MFD. “Our call volume increased, and our capacity decreased,” says current assistant chief Joshua Parish. “[Some] stations are seeing double the volume they were seeing 20 years ago.”
Lipski, over 6 feet tall, bald, with a strong, gruff Wisconsin accent, is not shy about promoting the department’s role in the unprecedented emergency.
“We [built] the command structure for the entire county response to [COVID], quite frankly, and it was imperfect, but it was way better than what it was going to be,” he says, also noting the “civil unrest-slash-riots” in the city that summer. “We absolutely put an imprint on how that was going to be managed, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. … In the middle of this, we’re absorbing increased run totals, we’ve had decreased staffing and resources etc., etc., etc. I guess firefighters are the new Timex. They take a licking and keep on ticking.”
In the midst of that, in October 2020, fire chief Mark Rohlfing retired and Lipski took over a department in crisis. Normally, firefighters work 24 hours on – during which they remain on call in their station, eating and sleeping there – and 48 hours off, but when the chief doesn’t have the people to fill all the stations, he mandates longer hours. MFD staff since 2020 have been working frequent 48-hour shifts and averaging 60-hour work weeks.
“Conditions have been absolutely terrible,” says Eric Daun, the president of the Milwaukee Professional Firefighters Association
labor union.
And the department’s been bleeding firefighters. Not counting normal retirements, Lipski says that in the past maybe one person would leave the MFD per year at most – switching careers or heading to a different city. In the past two years, 28 firemen have left MFD, according to Lipski. These were people in the middle of their careers, giving up pensions to get out of the job. Many said it was those 48-hour shifts that drove them out.
On top of that, there have been 170 retirements – many unexpected – in the last four years, and a recruiting class was delayed due to COVID.
Last year, a Milwaukee firefighter in his 30s died by suicide.
“[His death] shook the entire system to its core,” Lipski says. “Some of our most seasoned, grizzled veterans shook their heads and started to realize there’s something going on here. … The human brain is not designed to constantly be bombarded with the things we see on a daily basis. It just isn’t.”
Lipski frames the staffing and call volume issue as more than just the well-being of his people, but also the safety of Milwaukeeans who may end up with slower response times when multiple calls in the same neighborhood stretch the MFD workforce thin.
Over the past two years, he’s been working to reverse the downward trend, advocating to reopen firehouses and for a more generous budget in Common Council hearings, negotiating with aldermen and keeping his stations operating, while he tries to pull the department out of a potential tailspin.
“There’s no magical silver bullet for any of this,” he says. “But if you nip away at small stuff, it eventually adds up to big stuff.”
THERE’S A PHOTO OF AN OLD MAN riding a horse-drawn steamer in Lipski’s office. It was taken in 1971, long after the fire department stopped using the antiquated engines – the man sitting behind the reins was one of the only Milwaukeeans left who knew how to operate one. When the department wanted someone to fill in for a re-enactment, they turned to Henry Lipski, Aaron’s great-grandfather.
Henry was part of the first generation of Lipskis to join the Milwaukee Fire Department over 100 years ago, along with his two older brothers.
Move to the opposite wall of Lipski’s office, and you’ll see a photo of Daniel Lipski, Henry’s son and Aaron’s grandfather, who spent over 40 years in the department.
Next to that photo, there’s a Polaroid of Daniel with his grandchildren, Aaron and his brother Dan. On the top of a neighboring bookshelf, you’ll see Aaron’s father, Neil, crouching in front of a training blaze with his fellow firefighters.
Look up, and you’ll see five helmets mounted on the wall. Two belonged to his grandfather, two to his father and then, farthest right, Aaron’s when he was a captain at Engine 8. Technically, it’s red, but you’d never know – the entire thing’s burnt black.
“There have been times when I came around the street corner, 1 in the morning, and boom, you just can’t believe how much fire you’re faced with,” Lipski says. “There have been so many moments where you’re kneeling in slush and running water at 10 below zero, and you’re trying to keep the house next door from starting on fire. … It’s hard to keep that helmet looking red.”
Lipski’s office is a museum and a shrine to a century of Milwaukee firefighters – but when he was a kid growing up near Washington Park, he didn’t want to be a fireman. “My father was gone a lot, working overtime shifts, always busy,” he says. “He’d come home just reeking of smoke, burned along the neck, wrists, behind the ears. There were broken bones. I was always proud of what my grandfather and my father did, but I had a front row seat and, Jesus, it was brutal on the human body.”
Lipski attended Riverside University High School on Locust, where he sang in the choir. For a while, the teenager considered a career in music or theater, and even briefly architecture. “I was all over the map,” he says. “But pretty soon reality sets in and bills have to be paid.”
After graduating high school, he ended up working with his brother for a private ambulance company as an EMT, while considering his next steps.
At that same time, his father, a battalion chief at the time, planted a seed. He mentioned that the department was running tests for new firefighters and asked his sons if they’d be interested. Lipski showed up at the MFD Wells Street offices, not expecting much.
“I don’t know what magical dust [my father] blew in the air that day, but when I walked out of his office, my entire worldview was shifted,” Lipski says. “All I could think about was, ‘How do I get this? How do I do this?’ I’ve never looked back.”
LIPSKI, 50, HAS A STRONG BUT PERSONABLE PRESENCE that can catch people off guard. He looks like what you might expect of a stereotypical Midwestern fire chief, but he also has a magnetism that defies that stereotype – other firefighters describe him as “charismatic.”
“He has a big personality,” says Leon Todd, the executive director of the Fire and Police Commission, which oversees the MFD. “He’s confident; he can communicate well with people.”
When his co-workers, family and other city officials who’ve worked with him are asked to describe Lipski, two words come across consistently: “passionate” and “emotional.”
“He cares so deeply about the Milwaukee Fire Department – more so than anyone else I’ve seen,” says Assistant Chief Parish.
Lipski, who is married and has a young adult daughter, is also more visible than most fire chiefs. Outside of business hours, he can be found at community events, listening sessions, town halls and much more. “We can’t only meet our community, and have them only meet us, during times of emergency,” Lipski says. “I think proximity informs comfort, comfort informs affinity and affection. That all sounds very Dr. Phil gobbledygook, but the fact of the matter is that people need that. I’m just a guy. I’m in this position. You need to give people that access.”
Parish traces Lipski’s increased investment in community relations and events to the summer of 2020, when protests led to increased discussions around police relations, and by extension other public service providers like firefighters. “I don’t know that anybody has been as consistent [as Lipski] about being out there,” Parish says.
Part of Lipski’s goal is to help the public understand that his department covers much more than just fires. There are two major buckets into which MFD’s work falls: fires and emergency medical services. The workload leans heavily toward the EMS side – Lipski says that currently about 84% of calls are for medical services, though fires take up a bigger share – about 40% – of the department’s time. Within those two broad buckets, the department deals with hazards, big and small.
The MFD measures its calls across dozens of categories: house fires, car accidents, overdoses, etc. Every category has risen in the past two years, with fires rising noticeably quickly. Lipski doesn’t point to one explanation but has several theories. For one, he believes that more people staying in their homes has made house fires more likely, as they’re often the result of a mistake, accident or negligence.
“Events that would have been major when I was young are almost passe or taken for granted now,” Lipski says. “Those major events typically represent horrible loss of life or loss of multiple lives. Horrible, grisly circumstances. And when it’s like, ‘That’s Tuesday,’ yeah, that’s a problem.”
IN 1997, LIPSKI JOINED THE MFD ranks as a fireman, the same year as his brother.
The following 27 years are displayed across his office in carefully saved mementos. He keeps the helmet shield from each of his posts mounted along the top of the wall – over a dozen in total, from a fireman with Engine 28 to a heavy equipment operator at Ladder 10 to a lieutenant with Ladder 17 to battalion chief with the Fifth Battalion all the way up to the chief’s shield that’s mounted on his helmet now. He’s held every position possible in the MFD and worked in nearly every corner of the city.
Dan Lipski recalls that early on in his brother’s career, he was rough around the edges when he thought something was being done the wrong way. “He could be more of a sledgehammer than a scalpel,” Dan says.
Lipski admits that when he first began to be promoted into leadership positions, he was a “slower learner” when it came to diplomacy.
“Frankly, I was very direct, and I would deal with [problems or mistakes] by kind of carpet bombing the situation,” he says. His brother warned him that it didn’t matter how right he was – if he continued to respond to people that aggressively, no one would want to listen to him.
“He was ruffling feathers,” Dan says.
That frankness continues to come through in the way Lipski talks about the department and its needs. He’s known for a straightforwardness about what he views as the problems facing his department – one that might ruffle feathers still.
“It serves absolutely no purpose from a strategic point of view to constantly couch things in media-friendly snippets and little soft, fuzzy PR flack terminology that doesn’t inform the public,” he says. “It doesn’t help the situation.”
At the same time, he’s taken pains to build positive relationships across the department and outside of it – and he’s become widely popular. When Rohlfing retired, Lipski was the unanimous pick of the Fire and Police Commission for the top spot.
“Aaron’s doing the least popular job in the entire department,” Dan says. “He’s in political arguments, budget arguments. … He’s doing the job that takes him the furthest from what he loved – getting dirty and crawling in and making a difference for someone.”
WHEN ASKED ABOUT HIS GOALS for the department, one thing Lipski brings up is simple. “I want to get my folks some rest.”
Across his career, he’s been a proponent of increased mental health awareness in the fire department and support for the people under
his command.
“Aaron Lipski is undoubtedly passionate – not just for the Milwaukee Fire Department, but for Milwaukee overall,” says Mayor Cavalier Johnson, who took office the year after Lipski became chief. “He’s driven to care about his men and women.”
Jeffrey Gauthier, who is now retired from the MFD, worked with Lipski on revising the department’s approach to substance use issues.
After struggling with addiction, Gauthier had gotten sober in his 20s, allowing him to join the MFD in 2000. “When I came into the fire service – and still today a bit – there was a lot of stigma around asking for help. … I hid [my sobriety] because of that stigma for almost 12 years,” he says.
Lipski, who was a battalion chief at the time, was one of the first people Gauthier spoke to when he decided he didn’t want to hide anymore. “Aaron made it easy for me,” Gauthier says. “We’ve been working together on mental health and behavioral health for our firefighters in one respect or another ever since.”
One major effort they helped shepherd was a revision of the department’s substance abuse policy. At the time, it was “one and you’re done,” meaning that if a firefighter failed a random drug test, they were immediately fired.
When you terminate someone after one offense, “you’re losing, in some cases, decades of experience, millions of dollars in training and institutional knowledge that you can’t replace,” Lipski says. “Instead, let’s try to help the person heal.”
Lipski’s work on mental health is part of his larger, explicit mission to provide better support for the people under his command.
As head of the firefighter union, which can easily run into conflicts with MFD chiefs, Daun recalls a moment that struck him as remarkable about Lipski – one of almost a dozen fires at the former, long-vacant Northridge Mall in 2022. The two-alarm fire in November emptied all the fire stations on the Northwest Side.
After the fire was put out, Lipski spoke to the firefighters on the scene and told them that he was going to talk to the press on the scene. If any of them wanted to stand with him, they could. If not, that was perfectly fine, too.
“To a man and a woman, everybody came and stood behind me,” he says. “When I turned around and I saw that, I was like, ‘OK, it’s time to talk.’”
He didn’t mince words.
“The whole rest of the Northwest Side is without emergency coverage right now, as we’re out here putting out fires in a pile of rubbish,” he told reporters. “I’d like you to look at the line of firefighters back here. These men and women have to go into this building repeatedly, putting their lives at extreme risk, because it has not been properly secured. It should have been razed a long time ago. … I’m not standing here and continuing to commit my firefighters to put their lives at risk – they have families – because a building’s not properly secured. This is absolutely unacceptable in 2022. Something has to happen.”
Daun says that kind of “brutal honesty” has been unusual in leadership for the Milwaukee Fire Department, and it reassured him that the new chief was an advocate for firefighters. “That’s what everyone appreciates about him.”
And, despite a byzantine labyrinth of legal and bureaucratic obstacles, eventually something did happen – in December, the Common Council voted to demolish Northridge Mall.
ANOTHER THING IN LIPSKI’S OFFICE – a map of Milwaukee. The streets are littered with sticky notes denoting fire stations. Purple and red tabs denote closed fire stations and decommissioned ladder trucks across the city, shuttered in an effort to balance budgets.
“If you’re coming up on election time, people elbow their way to the front of the line to be next to a fire truck in a parade,” Lipski says. “As soon as the election’s over, it really only goes one way. … We’re going to provide the fire department just enough [money] to keep its nose above water. We’re 15, 20 years into being dealt with that way.”
His brother Dan, who retired from the MFD in 2021, is less diplomatic.
“If you watch Common Council meetings, there are always several aldermen who want to take potshots at firemen,” Dan says. “‘Oh, the greedy firemen, this and that.’ All of our chiefs prior to this just kind of smiled and nodded and let the alder or the council member say their piece. Aaron is 100% calling them out on it. He won’t tolerate it.”
But in Lipski’s view, that perceived lack of support for firemen seems to be changing. He has many positive things to say about the new political regime in Milwaukee. “With our city agencies and our elected officials and the Fire and Police Commission, I will say that, by and large, I feel very supported,” Lipski says, and then laughs. “Which is not an outcome I would have predicted.”
He credits Mayor Johnson and County Executive David Crowley with a more generous approach to funding the department, and with leading bipartisan efforts with the Republican-led state government to boost funding, including securing Milwaukee’s new 2% sales tax as part of Act 12.
“These jobs can be very taxing jobs where you’re sacrificing a lot,” says Johnson. “You’ve seen resignations with firefighters going to municipalities with less complicating schedules. That’s part of the reason [Lipski and I] worked collaboratively [to secure Act 12]. … Part of our promise is to increase the number of firefighters on the job to reduce some of that burnout.”
In January, the MFD reopened Fire Station 17 on the South Side, which closed in 2020, and added a paramedic unit to the North Side. This fall, applications will open for a fresh class of firefighters to continue filling the unprecedented retirement and resignation gaps of the past four years. Station 17’s return to service signals a welcome change to Lipski and the rest of the department, one of those small things that will hopefully lead to a long-term improvement.
“Respite is coming,” says Parish. “It’s amazing to actually be able to plan ahead and not have the outlook be super grim.”
Within the first couple of weeks of its opening, Station 17 was first on the scene at four structure fires, including an apartment building where firefighters rescued several residents. And the new EMS unit on the North Side has been absorbing much of the extremely high call volume in that part of the city.
For Lipski, after three years on the job, it feels like the beginning of a new era. “We’re finally starting to go in the right direction here,” he says. “There’s a sense of decompression among everybody. For the first time in a long time, people are like, ‘Hey, this isn’t so bad.’”
