CANFIELD — The Canfield Fair does not begin until Aug. 27, but preparation to make sure it goes off without a hitch is already well underway.

Canfield’s Cardinal Joint Fire District Chief Don Hutchinson said police agencies around Mahoning County already have had their planning meeting, and a similar meeting for fire agencies is scheduled Wednesday.

The department’s staffing always increases during fair week, but Hutchinson said he already has had to make changes to account for construction work expected to affect fair traffic flow.

A $10 million bridge replacement project along U.S. Route 224 began in April, and Hutchinson said it has required him to assign additional fire and EMS staff to the fire station at Messerly Road to ensure the department can respond quickly to accidents on the east side of the project zone.

Cardinal also has adjusted its automatic mutual aid agreement with Boardman to ensure emergency response access on the western side of the construction area. Hutchinson said that all began Thursday.

“Thursday was the start of what we’re going to be seeing during the fair,” he said. “So we have extra personnel in case of accidents, fires. We normally have a mutual aid agreement with Boardman, but now we upped it, so we’re in a good position to deal with those problems and incidents on the turnpike.”

As for the fair, Hutchinson said he expects the construction will throw something new at them almost daily during that week, and Canfield police and the Ohio State Highway Patrol will have to be flexible to maintain traffic to and from the fair. Flexibility is the basis of fair preparations, Hutchinson said.

“Every year, we watch what’s going on at all the other county fairs in the nation, what events have they had, and we look to adjust to it, and try to prepare,” he said. “The next two weeks in Canfield, we’ll be training on many types of fire incidents, propane leaks and EMS calls. Our goal is not to end up on CNN or Fox. The goal is to interrupt the emergency, and we’ve been doing pretty good at that.”

NEW PLANNING ADMINISTRATOR

Conner O’Halloran is Mahoning County’s new emergency planning and E911 administrator. He recently resigned from his role as a captain with the Cardinal district for that job, and maintains a part-time position as assistant chief with Poland’s Western Reserve Joint Fire District.

He said the county’s various police and fire agencies are well prepared to support Canfield, OSHP, the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office and Canfield Fairgrounds Police. The county’s emergency management officials prepare for the fair year round, and

O’Halloran said they will be ready by opening day Aug. 27. The fair runs through Labor Day Sept.1.

“I’m pretty proud of how we built out our command post and created an entire field hospital,” he said. “We take basically an urban big city operation and miniaturize it. Instead of ambulances, we have golf carts, instead of police cruisers we have officers on foot all over the fair grounds.”

O’Halloran said Canfield starts increasing all of its fire and EMS staff for 24-7 service, with minimum crews of four to eight people on Tuesday before the fair even opens, and maintains full fire and EMS coverage throughout the week, not only at the fairgrounds but to ensure the safety of Canfield city and township residents as well.

The department and others will establish their presence the week before, conducting fire safety, and building inspections.

“Wednesday is the preview day, when we do food trailer inspection, with the health department working in concert with our guys,” he said. Canfield usually handles Wednesday alone because attendance volume allows for it, but Hutchinson said the rest of the week there are at least three other county fire departments providing additional support on site.

Hutchinson and O’Halloran said the fair usually gets about 100 or more fire and EMS calls during fair week. O’Halloran said those vary in type and severity, but the most common calls are for bee stings and allergic reactions and heat-related illness.

“When (then-presidential candidate Donald) Trump came in 2016, so many people were lining up and a lot of people lined up where there was no shade, and we got some heat-related calls,” he said.

Bigger medical emergencies do happen, of course, and O’Halloran said they are well prepared. When a fairgoer suffered a heart attack a couple of years ago, emergency staff responded so quickly with a defibrillator that the patient was talking in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

“I think the cool thing is the field hospital, which is such a huge resource,” he said. “We want people to be able to stay at the fair. You’ve paid to come in, you’re there with friends and family. Maybe you just need some AC and water or IV fluid and then you go back to the fair. We hate to see people leave and go to the hospital unless it is really necessary.”

PREPARED FOR EMERGENCIES

University Hospitals has been staffing the fair for the past three years and will continue to do so in 2025. Most of the staff is nurses, but O’Halloran said that on high-volume days, there also are emergency room physicians on site as well.

The hospital and police station are located between the grandstand and Speed Barn (Building 32). A great deal of planning goes into not just the opening of the fair, but every day of its operation, O’Halloran said.

“The safety briefing is pretty neat. It includes all department heads, police, fire, Mahoning County Board of health) the fair board, and we just go over the plan for the day,” he said.

Those safety services agencies and officials are in constant contact over radios and phones.

The county recently approved the transition from its current radio network to the state-operated MARCS system, but that transition has not been completed yet. The fair this year will maintain use of its countywide system and MARCS and the systems will be integrated for seamless communication.

“If anyone sees a high increase in something, like if there are trash cans with a lot of bees, we get staff out there to clear those out or spray some repellent, or there’s an animal prone to biting, so we can post signs, that’s the neat part that brings everything together,” O’Halloran said.

Hutchinson said his department and the fair board do everything possible to not only be present and ready, but to help fair vendors and participants be proactive in preventing problems, too.

“Inspectors look for gas leaks, and every vendor has a fire extinguisher, to keep everything to a minimum. And we have a fire extinguisher company on site on Tuesday and Wednesday, if they need to be refilled or inspected or if somebody needs to buy a new one, they are there,” he said.

The concern for safety reaches outside the festival area, as well, Hutchinson said.

“The other thing is we know in the evenings we will have two firefighters by the camp ground, because there are about 500 campers during the fair, so it’s like its own little city out there,” he said.

POLICE PRESENCE

In recent years, the fair has seen a few cases of violence, usually over the weekend. One was a fight that included up to 100 people, and one person reportedly had a gun. O’Halloran said they are reviewed and everyone adjusts each year to minimize the risk of repeating them.

“The line I like to use is: for every officer you see, there’s one you don’t see,” he said. “There’s a lot of layers of surveillance and if something did happen, we have a strong plan and we bring a very strong and rapid response.”

The Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office is on the ground inside the fairgrounds at all times, while Canfield police and OSHP largely patrol the perimeter and manage traffic flow. But those agencies are well versed in the emergency response plans for any event.

Hutchinson said the plans are reviewed exhaustively and there are contingencies and immediate reaction responses for any scenario.

“We’re definitely aware, and we have surveillance in place for it, and there’s going to be some generally isolated incidents, but the number of problems that are stopped before they ever get into the fair is incredible,” O’Halloran said.

HAM RADIO OPERATIONS

One of the biggest problems, though, he said, is one that nobody can really do anything to stop or change — the weather.

“Microbursts are a huge concern, and when we had a tornado warning two years ago, I think it touched down in Boardman but for the Fairgrounds the main concern was all the rain,” he said.

O’Halloran said the fair’s emergency service personnel have always maintained constant real-time communication with the National Weather Service in Cleveland. But this year they have an extra hand.

“One of the new things is that they’re sending us a meteorologist to be in the safety briefings and be on site on the busy days,” he said. “We want to make sure all the appropriate information is given to decision makers.”

Even when the NWS is not physically there, they can quickly reach O’Halloran or the fair’s dispatch center.

“They have the same radio channel on the MARCS system so they can radio us too. We did this a few years ago when a storm cell came in and we could pick up our portable radio and talk to Cleveland in real time,” he said.

Another piece of the puzzle is a group of unsung heroes who are there to help with the daily communications but also are ready to keep communication flowing if the worst scenarios should come to pass.

A group called the Mahoning County Amateur Radio Emergency System has been working the fair with emergency services for the past two years in a limited capacity. The group’s designee to the county EMA board is Frank Sole.

He said this year, they will have boots on the ground all week.

“What you’re dealing with is an important subset of amateur radio. We are licensed through the FCC,” he said. “And part of our licensed mission, the reason we exist, is to provide a means of emergency communication.”

Sole said that cell phones and police radios are great for day-to-day operations, but cell networks can crash on a bad day, and all those radios rely on the electrical grid. Not so for HAM radios.

“The regular equipment and systems are sized for normal traffic,” Sole said. “On a bad day those will get overloaded because traffic increases 100-fold.”

Amateur radio is ad hoc, meaning the equipment is designed to handle any volume at virtually any frequency.

“We have in our little radios, the entire electromagnetic spectrum,” Sole said.

And while police and fire radio systems allow for voice communication only, HAM radios allow for just about everything.

“We can do digital, morse code, send pictures, send high-def TV,” he said. “Taking those types of skills and applying them to an emergency is critical.”

This is something Sole and ARES do for free. And while the most critical of their skills are unlikely to be called upon, their presence provides another layer of security — more eyes and voices to keep police, fire and other authorities aware.

“With some of the events that have gone on , there was a need for non-police, non-uniformed people to just be strolling the grounds,” he said. “We provide more situational awareness.”

Their radios are tied into all the same systems O’Halloran, Hutchinson, and OSHP are using.

“And we’ll have our own frequencies for our plain-clothes people in the fair,” Sole said. “They are not for law-enforcement or fire or those agencies, they are just there to communicate.”

They walk around and keep a constant flow of communication so emergency response teams and fair staff know what is needed. They also provide valuable assistance to fairgoers in need. Last year, the ARES folks helped reunite at least two or three missing children with their families.

When those weather problems come in, Sole said, they are ready for that too. ARES is an ally of the National Weather Service.

The NWS’s Sky Warn service is a group of ad hoc storm spotters, and about 80% of them are HAM radio operators.

“The radar will show them a fingerprint or a signature of a tornado, but they don’t know if a tornado has touched down, and that’s where the spotters come in, for providing real-time information on the ground,” Sole said. “We do spotting locally and relay to someone here in Mahoning County to give the NWS in Cleveland live information.”