Weather threatens to strand conventioneers

Friday, Jan. 7, 2005 | 11:08 a.m.

With snow on the East Coast, ice storms in the Midwest and heavy rain in California, it's no surprise that thousands of people who are flooding Las Vegas for the International Consumer Electronics Show are keeping a close watch on weather forecasts.

Officials at McCarran International Airport, one of the first places affected by foul weather elsewhere, say they're about as ready as they can be if flight delays snarl air traffic from the east and leave conventioneers without a way home.

"It's actually encouraging that a lot of people aren't planning to try to get out Sunday," said Elaine Sanchez, a spokeswoman for McCarran. "We've heard from some airlines that a lot of flights may be pretty full on Monday."

Sunday is the last day of CES and last year's going-home crowd was discouraged by long lines through security checkpoints. This year, McCarran will have more screeners to accommodate conventioneers, but a series of weather fronts nationwide is threatening to make the commute home a little treacherous.

"There's not a lot we can do about weather systems," Sanchez said. "We provide the best we can in operations and we've already established a procedure to communicate with CES" if flights are delayed or canceled from other cities.

Sanchez said Las Vegas' airport is typically busy on Sundays already with weekend tourists making their way home.

"There will be some wait periods, but we don't expect anything that would be atypical," Sanchez said. "If flights are delayed, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

She added that some travelers are expected to extend their stays to Monday or Tuesday to avoid the rush, "and besides, the weather's probably going to be a lot better here than elsewhere."

But not necessarily.

Rain is in the forecast for Las Vegas, which has conventioneers like Charles Erdei of Orange, Calif., concerned about the drive to greater Los Angeles.

"I hope it's only going to take about five hours," Erdei said optimistically. "It really is going to depend on whether there's rain or snow on Cajon Pass. If there is, it will probably close. I'll probably just sleep and let somebody else drive."

Erdei is part of a group from Transcend Information Inc., a Taiwanese company that produces and distributes flash memory cards and other storage media and this year is showing the Digital Album, a device that stores and displays photographs straight from the memory cards.

Also looking skyward today will be Monica McKane, a market researcher from NPD Techward, Port Washington, N.Y., who hopes weather delays won't prevent her from getting into New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport over the weekend.

"One of the other members of our team wasn't able to get here because of weather delays out of Chicago, and I heard it was snowing back East," she said. "I'll probably just worry about it tomorrow."

And, if Southern Nevada's weather turns gloomy and runoff washes out some of the walkways around the Las Vegas Convention Center, workers for GES Exhibition Services already have some portable bridges ready to install.

"We rented a bunch of them and have them ready to go if we need to put in some walkways between the indoor and outdoor exhibits," said Detra Page, a spokeswoman for Las Vegas-based GES.

Because of the massive size of CES -- there are 1.5 million square feet of exhibits at this year's closed-to-the-public show -- temporary exhibition halls have been erected in the parking lots adjacent to the Convention Center.