You have to be pretty nimble as a trade show manager if you want any hope of dodging the kinds of disasters that can be lurking in your path. But every so often a snafu comes along that is utterly impossible to avoid no matter how high you can jump, and the only thing left to do is say a little prayer that somehow things aren't quite as bad as they seem. I earned my stripes in that regard a few years ago when I filled in for a colleague and managed one of her client's exhibits. She was double booked and had to be somewhere else, but she'd already made all of the arrangements for the show and asked me to merely be her stunt double on the trade show floor. It sounded like a piece of cake.

The exhibition in question was The Cable Show, and her client planned to display its various routers and other network components in the booth. So all those product displays were shipped to the venue in Washington, DC. The company's 20-by-30-foot exhibit had been rented from Freeman, and show labor was contracted to install it. All I had to do was arrive the day before the event opened to oversee the finishing touches on the booth, including placement of the client's very sophisticated (and very expensive) equipment samples.

My colleague, who was neck deep in detailed preparations for her other event, called me out of the blue the day before I was set to leave for the show and asked if I would mind going a day early. There was some kind of flood at the convention center, she said, so I needed to check out the booth to make sure it was OK. That was all she knew.

I'd never heard of flooding being an issue at convention centers, except for during natural disasters or after a major fire, of course. But it was June, the East Coast was enjoying beautiful weather, and nobody was reporting anything about a raging blaze. Assuming there must have been some kind of misunderstanding or mishap of the man-made variety then, I hastily juggled my flights and headed for the show a day ahead of schedule, just to be on the safe side.

When I walked into the venue a few hours later, I set out for show services so I could ask where our booth was and whether I needed to be concerned over the flooding I'd heard about. I told the show-services staffer what company I was with, and her eyes got kind of big, which I thought was strange. She asked me to wait and beckoned a supervisor over, who started off by saying, "I'm really sorry, but we're doing everything we can to make it right."

I'm pretty sure my heart stopped beating for an instant. My pleasant smile was frozen on my face while my mind tried to make sense out of the words he'd just said. "Uh, what do you mean?" I asked, trying to sound casual but clearly looking alarmed.

"Well," the man told me, "the flood came from a water pipe above your booth, and it took about an hour to get it shut off." I think he said something else after that since I could see his lips moving, but I couldn't hear him because there was a thundering sound in my ears from my blood pressure spiking to unhuman levels.

I wasted not a minute and hustled to the booth, which looked more like a swampy wetland on the show floor than an exhibit. Though I was arriving well after the water event, it was pretty clear that it was a place where all hell had broken loose. Everything was gone, and the carpet was stripped away right down to the concrete, creating a space that more resembled the first day of setup than the last. Shrapnel from what looked like our booth was scattered in the aisles as if it had been hastily dragged away while water gushed from overhead.

A crew was working feverishly to pull out soggy Sintra panels and dry partially disassembled booth sections. Other workers were pushing squeegees across the floor to route remaining water toward a drain that miraculously happened to be in the floor under my client's display.

As I stood there for a moment with my mouth agape, a supervisor explained that someone driving a cherry-picker type of vehicle was in the process of hanging our booth's sign and accidentally sent the bucket up when he meant to send it down. That caused the lift to puncture a water pipe running overhead, which immediately turned it into a high-pressure sprinkler spraying water across the entire square footage of the booth that I was there to finish. It continued for an hour, he said, because the shutoff for that pipe was in another part of the convention-center complex about three-quarters of a mile away.

One of the workers came over to show me a video someone had shot on their phone, and when I saw it, I could only sputter a few choice expletives. In the video, the helpless workers had already pulled everything they could out of the space and were brainstorming a solution. Eventually, they decided to create a makeshift funnel out of Visqueen that they hoped would direct the spray straight down toward the drain. After a while, a utilities crew arrived and punched a large hole in the pipe to ease the pressure and allow the water to pour straight to the floor before venue staffers were able to shut off the valve and stop the flow of water.

Since this was a rental booth, the supervisor assured me that they were going to have a new exhibit in place for me in no time, no matter what they had to rush to produce. But the bigger worry was whether my client would have any equipment to display that had not been destroyed.

Mercifully, the products were all still in crates, but those crates were soaking wet. We cracked them open one at a time and found that the contents for the most part were dry, as the plywood had absorbed much of the brunt of the deluge. The only container that was completely soaked through was one containing thumb-drive tchotchkes, and even though we had to throw them all away, I felt incredibly fortunate that this was the extent of the irreparable damage.

Despite a pretty frantic day, I was feeling lucky indeed. It could have been a sewer pipe, for starters. The ruined display could have been a custom exhibit instead of a rental, and the products could have been uncrated in the space. Plus, we had the whole next day to get resituated, and thanks to the drain underneath our exhibit, the space dried pretty quickly. For a disaster, it couldn't have gone much better, and I was comforted by the fact that I was nimble enough to avoid an epic freakout and just go with the flow, so to speak.