Disaster Relief Efforts Offer a Reminder

It would certainly be hard to tell the 250,000 or so people left homeless by Hurricane Katrina, but the urgency with which the media — including Tradeshow Week — addressed the disaster has relaxed a bit.

While this week's issue of TSW does carry a story about the continuing relocation of tradeshows, it is a far cry from our Sept. 19 issue, when every single page was devoted to the disaster's impact on the industry.

Evidence seems to indicate that, while the double whammy of hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast region, the larger national economy barely missed a step. The national unemployment rate increased slightly in September, but not nearly as much as one might have imagined in the days immediately following Katrina.

And even as we report that shows previously scheduled in New Orleans are making other plans, we also are reporting that they expect to return there in the future. The Intl. Assn. for Exhibition Management announced last week that its annual Expo! Expo! will take place in New Orleans in 2009.

Life goes on.

Now that the disaster has moved to the stage where those of us not immediately affected can approach it with some perspective, I, for one, am impressed by those on the convention center side of the industry who made great efforts and sacrifices to help those in the Gulf region. In some cases, convention centers more than 1,000 miles away from Louisiana and Mississippi did not hesitate to clear their schedules and make room for evacuees.

We have reported in recent weeks how convention center workers who knew their facilities were in the direct path of the hurricanes chose to stay at work and help others, rather than evacuate their families and themselves.

TSW is a business magazine and, consequently, we most frequently serve the dollars-and-cents interests of our readers. Both the editors here and our readers often look at cities as simply places where, for one business reason or another, tradeshows are held. They are, in many ways, interchangeable. While it is typically news to our readers if a TSW 200 show moves, say, from Houston to Atlanta or from New York to Las Vegas, it is because of the fact that somebody somewhere will profit and somebody else won't.

We don't always focus on the fact that convention and visitors bureau officials are busy trying to lure shows to their cities because they expect the economic activity they will generate to be a benefit to their communities.

A tradeshow floor or hotel room in one city can look very much like one in any other city, if you let it. So it is easy to forget sometimes that we are invited or encouraged to visit cities because doing so will ultimately help their citizens.

It was in that spirit of community that so many people abandoned their plans, in some cases made years in advance, to help others who had been forced from their homes.