In lengthy EMS career, Vern Smith witnessed history
This article is one in a series of articles about what life looks like in Butler County ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary on July 4, 2026. Stories in this series aim to showcase what it’s like to live, work, play and serve in Butler County during this moment in history.
In an alternate universe, Vern Smith could have spent the bulk of his life as a firefighter. He joined the Greenwood Village Volunteer Fire Department in 1970 and gradually rose through the ranks over the next few years, looking to one day become fire chief.
On a cold New Year’s Eve night in 1973, fate had other plans in store for Smith.
“I was in a structural fire, and the floor had burned out. I almost went through the floor,” Smith said. “Being in a smoke-filled room where you can’t see and the possibility of dying … it was not necessarily one of the careers that I wanted.”
After that night, Vern Smith decided to make a career change. He transferred over to the department’s emergency medical services division.
“I got involved in emergency medical services while I was in the fire department, and I really enjoyed the hands-on opportunity for patient care,” Smith said. “So I got into emergency medicine at that point.”
It would kick-start a career in EMS that would last over half a century, until Smith — by then serving as Clarion County’s 911 coordinator — finally hung up his boots in 2016. Before then, his resume included stints at Zepfel Ambulance in Pittsburgh, Butler Ambulance Service, Butler Memorial Hospital (where he served as administrative director of emergency services), and Butler County Community College, where he served as director of EMS and police programs.
One of Smith’s major contributions to Butler County emergency service took place during the 1980s, when he established a dedicated paramedic unit stationed at Butler Memorial Hospital called Medic One. The unit was designed to assist the county’s existing ambulance services with advanced 24/7 life support.
“This particular unit was designed to augment the ambulances and provide advanced life support to the communities in Butler County, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Smith said. “It was designed to augment ambulance services with advanced life support because … ambulance services did not have that capability of providing paramedic services 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And the majority of the ambulance services back then … had no advanced life support or paramedics aboard their units.”
Medic One was disbanded in 1995.
A highlight of Smith’s career in EMS happened in 2011, when he was called upon to present for an audience of government personnel and physicians at a conference on disaster preparedness in Chennai, India, on behalf of the United Nations.
According to Smith, the organizers of the program sought him out after seeing that he had co-authored a textbook on International Trauma Life Support. It took plenty of convincing to get him to agree to come.
“I said no, and two days later he called again and said, ‘Will you reconsider?’” Smith said. “Finally, after three or four phone calls, I said, ‘You know, I’ll go.’”
During his two-week stay in Chennai, Smith taught a course on disaster management, as well as International Trauma Life Support Access. Even after he started feeling homesick, Smith’s stay in India was extended just before he was originally set to return to the United States.
“We were there for about a week, and they came to us one night and said we need to stay another few days,” Smith said. “They ended up pulling our passports and we ended up staying there the next few days. … The first thing I did when I got to New York is, I ran to McDonald’s and got a burger,” Smith said.
During the course of his career, Smith had the unlucky responsibility of being called out to the site of three major U.S. plane crashes in less than a decade: the crash of USAir Flight 427 just outside of Pittsburgh in 1994; Valujet Flight 592 into the Florida Everglades in 1996; and the deliberate crash of United Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001.
“Those three particular incidences are traumatic,” Smith said. “And we’re not like Etch A Sketches, where you can write on something and then shake it and it goes away. These are situations that you take with you for the rest of your life.”
Smith was dispatched to all three accidents as a member of a federal Disaster Medical Assistance Team. In all three cases, he was one of those tasked with tagging human remains and other debris for the crash investigation.
“My job in those three particular incidents was to recover the remains,” Smith said. “When you’ve got 140-something passengers and 8,000 bodily remains, it makes it very difficult. It's a situation that’s very traumatic to the rescuers because of the odor involved.”
The aftermath of the Valujet plane crash, which led to the loss of 110 lives, was especially tricky for Smith and other first responders, as they had to deal with the unforgiving environment of the Florida Everglades.
“That was a different scenario because it was in the water, and there were a lot of crocodiles,” Smith said. “I don’t particularly care to be fed to a crocodile.”
Smith was also present for the response to prominent local emergencies, such as the 1985 tornado outbreak which killed six in Butler County, and the murder of Saxonburg Police Chief Gregory Adams in 1980.
Despite the multiple traumatic experiences he’s been through, Smith never let them disrupt his passion for serving the community. He says his passion dates back to an incident from his short-lived firefighting career, when he was forced to rescue his grandfather from a near-death experience.
“There’s a gentleman I took a training program with. He did his thesis on why people get involved in emergency services, and he stated that people who get involved in fire, police, or EMS had some type of an incident before getting into the public safety field that affected them,” Smith said. “As a firefighter, I helped resuscitate my grandfather who was in cardiac arrest. That kind of triggered me to give back to the community.”
“It’s fulfilling, it’s exciting, and it’s a commitment. And the bottom line is, to survive in this industry, you need to take care of yourself.”
