I'm guessing that the countdown is when the event ends. Whoever designed quest 13 was probably just thinking with his/her ass at the time, and didn't realize how big of a bottleneck it would be. Or it might be one of those things where the quest made sense at some point in time, but the mechanics of the event got changed, and the quest didn't get changed to match it. Either way, I think we're probably all screwed.
But we can also hope that the person who screwed up is actually the one who designed the countdown timer, and that maybe we actually get 30 days or something.