The Connecticut Maritime Association appears increasingly unlikely to be able to keep late-June dates for its annual conference and exposition in Stamford – already postponed once from late-March.
Outgoing CMA president Joseph Gross told TradeWinds this week that no decision has been made on whether to change the 29 June-1 July dates, which had been set after CMA scrapped the March plans.
“We’re continuing to monitor and evaluate the situation very carefully. That’s where we are,” said Gross, who is dry operations manager for d’Amico Shipping USA.
However, a staffer at the event hotel, the Hilton Stamford, told a caller this week that CMA does not have a block of rooms reserved for the 29 June-1 July time frame and has been investigating dates stretching into September.
Gross said he has a different understanding of the hotel arrangements, saying that reservations were automatically transferred from March.
In any case, the Hilton is currently open only to customers deemed "essential" workers under official guidelines. The state of Connecticut remains under a government-imposed shutdown through at least 20 May.
Among other things, the state government’s restrictions prohibit social gatherings of more than 50 people.
Connecticut has been hit hard by Covid-19 infections, ranking fifth in the nation in per capita cases on recent numbers. Stamford is located only 43 miles from New York City, the world’s epicentre for the virus, which originated in Wuhan, China.
Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont has been one of the nation’s most cautious in remarks about reopening the economy. A growing number of communities have cancelled their traditional July 4 fireworks celebrations over "social distancing" concerns.
One shipping event after another has either been postponed, cancelled or moved online as the coronavirus impact persists.
Just this week, the largest ship-finance event in the US – Marine Money Week New York – decided to cancel for 2020.
Marine Money originally had been scheduled at the Pierre Hotel in midtown Manhattan from 15 to 17 June – only a couple weeks before the current CMA dates.
TradeWinds reported Marine Money’s original intention to postpone the conference on 27 March.
This year’s largest shipping conference, Posidonia in Greece, has elected to postpone from early June to new dates beginning 26 October.
In addition, the mammoth Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) in Houston has chosen to cancel rather than postpone its planned dates 4 to 7 May.
