This year’s edition of the Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada (USA) was marked by a lot of rain and mud. Miners who took part in the event talk about the challenges they faced in the American desert. One of them had to walk for an hour and a half through thick mud, and another said he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to leave the camp if he ran out of supplies.
The festival started on August 27th, a Thursday. It started to rain this Saturday (September 2nd), so the participants were only able to leave the desert two days later, on Monday (September 4th). Gabriel Christo, 36, is a software engineer and was one of the miners who attended Burning Man. “It rained all day and into the night,” he remembers. Gabriel reported seeing flooded tents, camps without power and people losing equipment, clothing and food. “It’s a festival that you really have to prepare for,” he says. Didio Mendes, 49 years old, businessman and resident of BH, was at the festival for the third time. He reiterates what Gabriel said: “One of the principles of Burning Man is that you are responsible for yourself, it’s not a tour,” he says.
Problems caused by rain
The Belo Horizonte businessman says the rain “surprised everyone.” He was at a party when it started raining. The desert sand, in contact with the water, turned into a kind of clay that stuck to people’s shoes and blocked the bicycles on which festival participants moved.
Gabriel describes that the city created specifically for the festival in the middle of the Black Rock Desert was “very large, very spacious,” which made the use of bicycles necessary. However, due to the mud, movement was only possible on foot and with great difficulty.
“It (the clay) is sticky, so it becomes a mass and is very difficult to move,” said Didio, who had to leave his bike behind and walk for an hour and a half back to the campsite. “All the bikes got stuck, everyone lost their bikes,” he added.
On the other hand, when Gabriel realized it was going to rain, he left the party and returned to the trailer he had rented with two other friends, where he saw people stranded in tents, flooded tents and lost items. However, the engineer reports that “people helped each other a lot” and the challenges helped bring him and his friends closer together.
End of the nightmare
So that no more people could enter the city in the desert created for Burning Man, the event gates were closed and around 72,000 people were trapped. The participants were only able to leave the place in the late afternoon of last Monday (September 4th). But then a new problem arose: traffic jams.
Gabriel reports that some people stood in a line of cars for up to 15 hours. “There were many, many cars that wanted to leave at the same time. When the sun came out and the ground started to dry, everyone decided to leave, which created a huge traffic jam,” he explained.
The 36yearold still thinks about what could have happened if they had been stuck at the festival longer. “If all 70,000 people were trapped there for a long time, eventually the food would run out and people would run out of water. It would really become a big catastrophe.” In his opinion, that was what worried people the most.