How Burning Man descended into chaos

More than 70,000 festival-goers were left stranded this weekend after heavy rain turned Burning Man into a mudbath.

A “mass exodus” was expected this morning as conditions eased enough to allow people to start leaving, said the BBC. But questions are already being asked over why the event was allowed to descend into such chaos, and about how a man died at the Nevada site on Friday.

‘Incredibly harrowing’

The storm that struck the Black Rock Desert last week is believed to have been the longest, heaviest rainfall since the festival began more than 30 years ago.

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“The remote area in northwest Nevada was hit with two to three months’ worth of rain – up to 0.8 inches – in just 24 hours between Friday and Saturday morning,” said CNN.

The downpour fell on dry desert ground, “whipping up thick, clay-like mud that some festivalgoers say is so thick they’ve had to tie bags around their feet to walk through it”, said the news site.

Burning Man is one of the US’s most popular festivals, in which visitors create a temporary city in the middle of the desert. But after it was hit by the remnants of Hurricane Hilary, organisers closed the entrance and exit gates and told the tens of thousands of attendees to conserve food, fuel and water.

The muddy conditions also obstructed the ability of organisers to move heavy equipment, including for fire safety, said the Burning Man Traffic social media account.

At first, many revellers “took the boggy conditions in their stride – dancing in the mud and holding karaoke parties”, said the BBC. But by Sunday the “sense of exhilaration had been replaced by a growing air of exasperation, with people increasingly keen to leave”.

The portable toilets at the site are usually cleaned “multiple times a day”, but specialist trucks had not been able to reach the site since the rain started on Friday, said the New York Post.

An unnamed Los Angeles-based doctor told Insider that dirty toilets and bad weather had put stranded revellers at risk of Covid-19, food poisoning and other hygiene-related bugs. “The port-a-potties are probably going to start overflowing,” he said, “and that’s gonna mix with the mud and the rain, and it’s going to possibly spread infectious diseases.”

As some understandably panicked, others put a brave face on it. “Survival mode, here we go,” Max Spooner, who was walking the grounds with a mattress strapped to his back, told USA Today.

Others chose to attempt the six-mile hike to the nearest highway, where organisers had previously said shuttle buses would be available. One of the hikers, the former Obama administration official and Supreme Court lawyer Neal Katyal, wrote on Twitter that the walk was “incredibly harrowing”.

The site is “far from major cities”, said The New York Times, as “the nearest is Reno, Nev., which is more than 100 miles away”. To get to Burning Man, people must either make it to the “two-lane rural highway that leads to the festival’s gate or fly into its small, temporary airport”, it added, noting that “both were still closed on Sunday”.

More rain expected

Officials revealed on Saturday that one person had died at the festival. The following day, Burning Man Communications said in a statement that the death was “unrelated to the weather”. The Pershing County Sheriff’s Office is still investigating the cause of the death.

Meanwhile, said the US Bureau of Land Management, “more rain is expected over the next few days” and “conditions are not expected to improve enough” to allow vehicles to enter the site.

Burning Man is a “celebration of self-expression that culminates in the ceremonial burning of a towering 40ft effigy”, said Sky News. But organisers said they had postponed the event’s traditional finale to Monday evening.

The organisers have also released a “2023 Wet Playa Survival Guide”, said SF Gate, which attempted to assure those stranded at the site that “we have done table-top drills for events like this” and “we will all get out of this, it will just take time”.