ALTAMONT — Brian Wood says he eats, sleeps, and breathes safety and security.

“There is evil in this world. We can’t change it,” he says, so he puts in place preventive measures. That includes training people to use metal detectors at the Altamont Fair and for the first time using hostile vehicle mitigation barriers at the fair’s center entrance.

Wood has been a volunteer firefighter since his youth and has worked for the Albany County Sheriff’s Office for 30 years. His title is commander in charge of the office’s critical incident and emergency management unit.

“The last two years, the sheriff has kind of anointed me as the guy who’s in charge of the fair as far as the sheriff’s office,” Wood said.

His wife “comes from the fair world” — her father was the fair board president for the Delaware County Fair — which has heightened his appreciation for the Altamont Fair.

Describing his job, Wood said, “I do targeted violence, I do emergency management, I do planning.” He said of the fair, “The more cops we have there, the less chaos is going to happen.”

The Guilderland Police, who manage traffic, and the Altamont Police, who handle the parking lots, are paid by the fair. The fair also has its own security workers and this year hired an outside security firm as well.

“Once you go through the gates inside the fair, that is run by the state police and the sheriff’s office,” said Wood. “This year, the sheriff was very generous.”

He noted that the office still has to have deputies on regular patrol.

“They’re here as a goodwill thing,” said fair spokeswoman Pat Canaday of the deputies and troopers. She noted they also have displays in the Hometown Heroes building, which this year featured a state police air boat.

This year’s tri-county fair ran from Tuesday, Aug. 12 through Sunday, Aug. 17.

Wood started each day at 7 a.m., setting up the command center and planning “who’s going to work what assignments.”

He worked 16 or 17 hours each day, overseeing dispersing crowds after the fair closed at 11 p.m. He left early on Thursday night to go to the town board meeting in Rensselaerville where he serves as deputy supervisor.

Wood worked well ahead of Fair Week with the fair board, its manager, and its head of security to keep the venue safe.

The number of fights this year was “way down” from years’ past, Wood said, “because we had a stronger law-enforcement presence this year.”

Friday and Saturday night, which are the most crowded, had a combined 25 officers from the sheriff’s office and the State Police.

Saturday night, five fights were reported but four had ended before officers arrived on the scene. “Response time is seconds not minutes … we’re right there,” said Wood.

One fight that was brought to the attention of fair administrators on a video, “you can clearly tell that this fight was staged,” said Wood, adding, “People will do that just for their YouTube.”

“There were no injuries this year from fighting …. I’m pretty sure no one was thrown out for fighting this year,” he said,

Wood added, “A couple of people were removed from the fair for arguing with a vendor” and on Sunday night, during the demolition derby, an intoxicated person was removed for “yelling obscenities and just causing a general disturbance.”

This was in contrast to years’ past, he said, when there had been some violent fights with a girl dragged through a bike rack, “people playing bumper cars in the parking lot, and people tasing people … it was kind of mayhem.”

Metal detectors

New to the fair last year were metal detectors for fair-goers to walk through at each entry point. “Last year, they just basically got metal detectors and popped them out by the gates,” said Wood. “Nobody was really trained last year on what to do if the metal detector goes off.”

During Fair Week last year, Wood conducted a security test, sending in undercover police officers with firearms. “We tested their procedures in identifying people that may not be honest about carrying firearms,” he said.

The result was: Six out of eight of the undercover officers got in with handguns.

“So this year, we did extra training because they’re always trying to make the fair safer,” Wood said.

This year, the security company hired by the fair supplied, at each gate, a walk-through metal detector and a handheld metal detector. Patrons were to empty their pockets or purses into a bin before walking through the detector.

“I understand there’s a fine line between customer safety and customer service,” said Wood, noting “people were getting a little restless” with some of the long lines.

The training was important, Wood said, because the security staff using the wands were often moonlighting rather than being police officers used to questioning people.

“Some big burly guy like me that looks like a redneck out the Hilltowns comes up to the gate and the metal detector goes off and you [the security worker] say to me, ‘Sir, do you have anything? And I’m like, ‘No, I don’t have anything — just my big metal belt buckle.’”

“It’s a deterrent,” said Canaday, the fair’s spokeswoman. “People come up to the thing and say, ‘Oh, there’s a metal detector and they’re examining bags’ … and so people would go back to their cars and return their stuff. They wouldn’t carry it in.”

Similarly, Wood said he heard stories of people legally carrying a concealed weapon who were detected and who would then “go back and secure them in their car.”

If anyone had been found with an illegal gun, he said, “That would be something we would have to take and we did not confiscate any guns at the fair.”

Woods said that those staffing the metal detectors were trained to pull people aside if the detector beeped to find out why — perhaps a metal hip or a rod in a broken leg. But they did not pat down patrons as is done at airports.

“Peole would be screaming that we’re being intrusive,” he said of a patdown.

Barriers

New this year was a line of hostile vehicle mitigation barriers placed by the fair’s center gate in front of the goat barn.

Each of the barriers, borrowed from the state, weighs 1,000 pounds.

“The sheriff’s actually buying 12 of them,” said Wood. “And they will stop a vehicle all the way up to a box truck if they were to ram the gate and then try to ram people.”

Hitting the row of barriers makes a vehicle inoperable, said Wood. “It won’t let it steer; it won’t let it drive.”

He also said, “It took a lot of effort from the fair folks and from the sheriff’s folks to move them out of the way when we had to move a cattle trailer or when you had to get a vendor in or out. But that was what we all agreed on would keep everybody safe.”

Wood went on to talk about the disaster on New Year’s Day in New Orleans when a truck plowed into a crowd on Bourbon Street, injuring 57 people and killing 14.

“It’s been a big concern of mine for several years at the fair,” Wood said, and he was pleased the fair was “in agreement this year that they would let us deploy those.”

“With all the law enforcement efforts that are going on against illegal guns, I feel like vehicles are the next biggest threat to public safety,” said Wood.

He imagined what could happen if someone were thrown out of the fair after being rowdy at the demolition derby. “You kick them out … They get in their car and they’re super mad; they could come in and just destroy as many people as they wanted because we didn’t have anything to protect the fair-goers inside the fair.”

While Gate 2 this year had the hostile vehicle mitigation barriers, gates 1 and 3 had metal water troughs — the kind used for cattle — filled with dirt and planted with flowers.

Because he “always tries to think like a bad guy,” Wood said, he will lobby the fair to place more substantial barriers at those gates next year.

EMS

The fair is its own EMS agency, said Wood, with probably eight to 10 emergency medical services workers on hand each day of Fair Week.

With the hot weather, elderly people who were “overheated and a little nauseous” were treated at the EMS station on the fairgrounds, given liquids to rehydrate, and a chance to sit in an air-conditioned space before being given a courtesy ride to their cars.

“The fair does a great job of treating people and trying to prevent them from having to go to the hospital,” said Wood, citing long emergency-room waits at Albany hospitals.

Guilderland Emergency Medical Services kept an ambulance at the fairgrounds for when it was needed, he said.

The sheriff’s office supplied an ambulance on Tuesday and Sunday nights for the demolition derbies, said Wood, but there were no injuries.

Final thoughts

“Too much can go wrong if somebody has a gun,” said Wood.

He went on about “life in general”: “People need to understand that we live in a different world. And that when places like the fair, or maybe your school or your town park has a party, stuff like this is going to start to pop up.

“We don’t want people not to come to the fair and that’s always the struggle. How do we get all the patrons in to enjoy the Altamont Fair?”

He urged patience in lines as the metal detector does its work or patience when the barriers have to be moved to allow a vehicle to pass.

In addition to an active shooter targeting a crowd, he said, people could be caught in a crossfire between, for example, gang members.

Referencing the shooting that occurred in Albany as crowds were leaving the July 4 fireworks, Wood said, “One guy shot a flare gun at the other guy and it burned somebody’s house all the way to the ground. And the other guy shot four rounds at the guy with the flare gun and he didn’t hit him but he hit four other people and tragically killed somebody.

“That’s what we don’t want to have happen in the fairgrounds.”