Did you hear the one about the convention of safety experts that got cut short by a natural disaster?
It's no joke. On September 13, the National Safety Council had thousands of members in New Orleans for its annual citywide convention at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, when Hurricane Ivan (and we don't mean one of those rum drinks they serve down on Bourbon Street) suddenly looked poised to strike the Crescent City. And to make matters worse, the convention's organizer had only been on the job for three weeks.
Talk about stressful. "I didn't even know half the staff yet," says Karen Howe, executive director of meetings and conventions for the NSC, based in Itasca, IL. "But there I was, asking them to entrust their lives to me as if I knew what I was doing!" She had other reasons for apprehension, having survived 2003's Hurricane Isabel. "Living through a hurricane is a very humbling experience," she notes.
The Big Breezy With everyone on tenterhooks waiting for the storm to arrive, Howe huddled regularly with staffers at the Sheraton New Orleans and the New Orleans Marriott (the two properties where everyone was relocated after the mayor imposed a lockdown) as well as the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau, to track the storm and devise a "game plan," as she calls it. They started by canceling the show a day early and locking down the hall, so that exhibitors who didn't have time to tear down their booths could come back and retrieve them later.
Meanwhile, most attendees managed to evacuate. But with 1.3 million people scrambling to get out of the Big Easy, many exhibitors were left stranded, thanks to an early airport closing, limited train service, and traffic jams bad enough to make Mardi Gras look as quiet as one of the town's famous cemeteries. Houston, for instance, is normally a five-hour drive, but took 18 hours to reach.
Fortunately, since the NSC's members—emergency medical technicians, engineers, and others in the safety and health fields—are dedicated to prevention and preparedness, Howe had plenty of help. Using hotel employees and the NSC members and staffers who'd been left behind, she assembled teams—with first responders as safety leaders—and went through drills of emergency procedures. Howe has praise aplenty for the CVB, but "I can't say enough about Mark Sanders, the Marriott's general manager," she adds. "He was honest, straightforward, and he helped me get hurricane-ready. He's a true leader."
A Might-Be Wind After three days of dread, the much-anticipated Ivan turned out to be little more than a tempest in a go-cup—it bypassed New Orleans altogether and hit the Florida Panhandle instead. Not that Howe is sorry for the anticlimax. "I was relieved," she says, "I woke up that Thursday morning expecting to see the city under water, and instead it was a bright, sunny day and the streets were dry. It was like a miracle."