EW Issue 3 2025

			Crisis management
that the government put on for people arriving in Madrid. However, it only did one stop – Sol, the city centre. The hotel was about one hour’ s walk from Sol. One of our participants told me that she was completely lost and it was getting dark, so two young students walked with her to the hotel. It is because of these kind acts that I’ m not put off hosting future events in southwestern Europe. EW – What will this event change about how you plan your events in the future? MH – Being able to think on your feet in the moment and trying to stay calm and logical is the lesson. It is stressful when things like this happen, but I’ ve had to deal with the Covid pandemic when all our events got postponed and I had to deal with the volcanic ash cloud that came over Europe in May 2010. EW – Overall, how did these blackouts impact the event? MH – Overall, we had a couple of speakers who had to do their presentation remotely and a couple of attendees did not attend as they were unsure whether the event was taking place. Apart from this, everyone was there in Madrid and we hosted a good two-day conference and exhibition. The resilience of our participants was a huge factor. They were really impressive.				have asked them to send out an official email outlining our plans, informing participants that the event would still go ahead. You just can’ t prepare for situations like this. You have to adapt. We are thankful that attendees showed up, and that they were appreciative of us not cancelling the event. Considering the lengths they all went through to get themselves to the hotel in Madrid, it was a relief that the event went ahead. How Portugal’ s Europalco dealt with the blackouts Portugal-based supplier Europalco also had events disrupted during the blackout. Founder and CEO Pedro Magalhães shared his account: “ We had two events in progress and two in setup on the day of the outage. The clients for the two ongoing events	Left: The blackouts on 28 April were one of worst in Europe’ s history

Police officers were controlling traffic at all major intersections chose to stop and cancel them. Of the two in setup, one proceeded as planned and the other was cancelled.

“ Europalco could have supported the ongoing events for approximately two hours, as the main equipment was backed by UPS systems. However, since catering services were involved and couldn ' t function without power, the clients ultimately decided to cancel.

“ We were prepared for outages lasting between four to eight hours. Once we realised it could extend further, we implemented additional measures – cutting down on power consumption and reducing the number of staff onsite to the minimum required.

“ We believe event organisers should assess the level of responsibility associated with their event. For medium to high-responsibility events, we strongly recommend using backup power systems. Naturally, this involves extra costs – but it’ s a matter of proper risk / reward assessment.

“ Everyone was surprised at the time – it was a situation we had never experienced before. Now, there’ s a clear awareness among the team that this could happen again, so we are actively exploring better ways to be prepared in case it does.” EW

EW – Did any impromptu discussions crop up about topics like energy reliability? MH – Yes, they did. Many speakers discussed how governments need to find alternative communication strategies when blackouts happen.

EW – Is there anything you’ ve learned from the experience? Or anything you’ d have done differently in hindsight? MH – Looking back, I probably should have somehow got a message back to my team in the UK. Ideally, I would

EW Issue 3 2025 | Page 37