LEXINGTON, Ky. (FOX 56) — Heavy traffic continues in airports as people plan their Derby trips. Staff at Lexington’s Blue Grass Airport said they’re ready for the flood of passengers that always arrive this first week of May.

The Kentucky Derby continues to bring visitors to the Commonwealth year after year, meaning these visitors will be crowding airports. For TSA Spokesperson Mark Howell, it’s all about learning from the year before.

“It’s a large event every year and it grows every year. We make sure that we get the projections from them so we can staff and open the number of lanes that we need, and if we need to, we bring in additional resources to help with that passenger volume. We’re looking at about a 10% increase in the number of passengers coming through the security checkpoint as opposed to last year, so we will have sometimes where we see some wait times at security checkpoints, especially in the early parts of the morning,” Howell said.

A handful of prohibited items can cause the lanes to slow down even more, which is why security staff like Laraine Conley are urging travelers to double-check what they’re bringing.

“All of these items we have found here at Bluegrass Airport, this is just a sampling. We do keep these items for training purposes. However, a lot of the items that we have, they actually get disposed of. So this is just a small sample of what we find on a daily basis,” Conley said.