Vern Smith of Butler Township got national attention Wednesday, which is something unusual for his response role in a vehicle crash in rural Clarion County.

However, that crash on Interstate 80 made national news because it involved 18 vehicles and resulted in two deaths as snow blanketed much of the region.

Smith, 911 coordinator and director of Clarion County’s Office of Emergency Services, received calls from television networks in New York and Chicago seeking information.

“It just lit up,” said Smith, 60.

Having just been hired by the county in September, this was Smith’s first major incident in that position.

The crash happened about 1:30 p.m. in Clarion Township as a result of whiteout conditions from heavy snow. From his view at the 911 center, Smith said visibility was about zero.

“It was pretty bad,” he said.

Smith said the call initially came in as a multivehicle accident with a tractor-trailer overturned.

“It turned out that there were 10 tractor-trailers and eight vehicles involved,” Smith said.

The crash ended up killing two people. Timothy Floravit, 35, of Beaver Falls apparently died of internal injuries from the crash while searching for his children outside his vehicle. Leonard Mink, 67, of Nancy, Ky., was struck by a vehicle after he left his truck to help other drivers.

Smith said 911 computers help guide the emergency management process, advising dispatchers on which emergency responders should be dispatched. However, he said the office quickly discovered local resources were exhausted because there were two other vehicle accidents at the same time in the county.

So, crews from other counties were called to help.

Emergency crews from Armstrong, Jefferson and Venango counties were summoned. Smith said six fire departments, eight EMS agencies, state police and county emergency management deputies worked the scene.

Shortly following the crash, several dozen calls began coming into the 911 center. The center has four dispatchers. In cases where dispatches are tied up by a number of calls, calls get sent to Elk County’s 911 center.

Overall, 24 people were taken to hospitals, but few of the injuries were serious. Smith said a bus was called in to transport people and to serve as a warming center. The last patient was moved about 3:30 p.m.

In addition to the snow and limited visibility, the temperature hovered around 9 degrees.

“It was bitter cold,” Smith said.

The road was closed until 2 a.m. Thursday. Smith said the 911 center coordinated with the state Department of Transportation and local police departments to reroute traffic off the interstate and onto Route 322. Traffic lights along the road were modified to make traffic flow more smoothly.

Smith finally was able to leave work at 9:30 p.m. that day. He normally gets out of work at 4 p.m.

“It was challenging, but we got through it,” Smith said.

But this was not the first major incident that he was a part of in his career.

In 2001, he helped in the response of the crash of United 93 in Somerset County in the 9-11 attacks and the Flight 427 crash in Beaver County in 1994, both as he was the director of the Emergency Medical Service Council of Butler County.

Smith said those incidents were traumatic. In the case of Flight 427, 132 people died, but there were about 8,000 individual pieces of remains at the crash site.

Smith was born and spent part of his childhood in Quantico, Va. He moved to Butler as a young child and graduated from Butler High School in 1974.

After that, he attended Slippery Rock University for a few years, but did not graduate.

He became a paramedic in the late 1970s and was named the “paramedic of the year” by the Emergency Medical Service Institute in 1980.

Before his current position, he worked for Southeastern Emergency Equipment, launching its Homeland Security Division.

Smith is a past administrative director at Butler Memorial Hospital, where he developed the hospital’s critical care ground transport system. He was a director of paramedic services at the hospital, and for 10 years was the director of the EMS and police training programs at the Butler County Community College.

He also provided natural disaster training in India for the United Nations.

Smith is married and has six children and six grandchildren.