THERE IS NO QUESTION that the tourism industry is vital to our state’s economy. It’s our No. 1 money-maker and job producer and a huge tax generator, and as a magnet for both the average and the influential from around the country and the world, it serves as a showcase, drawing in would-be investors and residents who might otherwise never consider moving here.

As such it rightly demands a seat at the table when policy is being made. While its national impact is not as dramatic, it counts for quite a bit on that level as well.

But there are limits to how far we should go to accommodate the industry’s needs.

When Horry County tourism officials complained that decisions officials in the other 45 counties were making about how to operate their schools were interfering with their ability to make money, state policymakers correctly — although belatedly and not without a fight — said that school concerns had to come first.

The same reaction should greet the latest demand from tourism officials in South Carolina and other coastal states, who want the National Weather Service to give the public less warning than it can when hurricanes bear down on the East Coast.

Next month, tourism officials from throughout the Southeast will meet in Myrtle Beach to make their case to weather service officials that they should revert to the three-day forecasting they had used up until this year’s hurricane season. They will argue that the new five-day forecasts of where a storm is likely to hit needlessly worry would-be tourists, who might decide to postpone or even cancel a trip to the beach if they see projections that a hurricane could strike during their stay. (Ironically, Myrtle Beach officials acknowledge that five-day forecasting of Isabel had just the opposite effect, diverting other states’ tourists here.)

We can certainly understand how frustrating it must be to lose business over fears of a storm that never arrives. But it’s important to keep that frustration in perspective.

First, we doubt the new five-day forecasts are going to have a huge impact on vacation planning. Most people about to head to the beach are going to be watching a brewing hurricane, and adjusting their plans as necessary, whether weather officials are drawing probability maps or not. And as officials point out, private companies will produce five-day forecasts whether the National Weather Service does or not.

But even if the longer forecasts do cause people to cancel or delay vacations to beaches that don’t end up getting hit, that’s not an unreasonable trade-off. Those extra couple of days will also cause people to cancel trips to the beaches that do get hit. Those extra couple of days help emergency officials make smarter and earlier calls about how to prepare for a storm. And with our coastal population mushrooming, and our highway capacity falling woefully behind in its ability to keep up with all those extra people, emergency officials need all the advance warning they can get in order to keep evacuations from becoming even more deadly than the storms themselves.

Tourism officials should be grateful for the extra warning. Yes, they might lose a little business from time to time over storms that don’t arrive. But we can’t think of anything that could do more permanent damage to our beach business than having large numbers of people die because people took their vacations and officials didn’t have enough warning to get the hordes of tourists and residents safely evacuated in time.