Evansville AMR Supervisor named Paramedic of the Year

EVANSVILLE, Ind. (WFIE) - Our first responders have hand their hands full with many large scale scenes we’ve seen here in Evansville in the past year.

One of them recently received top recognition in Indiana.

The crash of escaped inmate Casey White. The Morton Avenue Warehouse Fire. The Weinbach Avenue house explosion - American Medical Response Supervisor James DiMarco responded to it all in 2022.

“Runs absolutely do take a toll, but those are what we prepare for,” DiMarco said.

He says he remembers being one of the first responders on scene on Weinbach Avenue.

“I was actually getting ready to go home. I was going to take a half day. We felt the building shake like most of the town here. I jumped out of the truck, and I was pulling out of the bay when we got the first dispatches. So I was on scene pretty quickly,” he explained.

DiMarco says he’s been serving the Evansville community as a paramedic since 2011, but his first responder career began in 1999.

He says his relationships with local fire and police helped in his response, especially at the Weinbach explosion.

“When we started finding patients and taking care of them, they trusted me to handle that side of things.”

That trust certainly proved to be true, earning DiMarco the title of the Indiana EMS Association’s Paramedic of the Year, for 2022.

He went to Indianapolis to receive the award on May 20.

While DiMarco appreciates the honor, he says recognition is not what this job is about.

“By and large we’re kind of behind the scenes people. We come in we do our job. There’s not a lot of thanks to it, and we just persevere. Most EMTs, paramedics are not looking for the limelight,” DiMarco said.

Through all of his years of service, DiMarco has learned…

“To some extent to survive in this job as long as I have, you have to let those runs go. You have to let the emotional toll of the runs go and roll off your back. Otherwise, you’ll burn out, and you’ll have to find other employment and find out another way to make it through life.”

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