By Sydney Dalske
The Burning Man festival occurs in the middle of a desert in Black Rock city Nevada. This festival has existed since 1986 starting in San Francisco but has been located in Nevada since the 90s. This extremely remote area in the northwest of Nevada received 0.8 inches of rain between Friday and Saturday morning this Labor day weekend. This amount of rain is normally the amount the desert would receive in a span of 2-3 months, poured all in a span of 24 hours. Flooding created unusable roads and trapped the festival’s participants in a shelter-in-place procedure along with having to conserve the few resources that they brought with them.
There was a driving ban on all of these participants from trying to leave the desert due to the fact that the dirt had such a deluge over it, it was unable to carry the tens of thousands of cars and RVs traveling over it. Despite this ban, people tried to hike out. Reporters say that between Sunday and Monday 8,000 people left, choosing to face the rough terrain rather than stay trapped. The image above is from a drone just showing a few hundred of the thousands of large vehicles on their way out of the area.
By midday Monday, there were still 64,000 people at the festival site. On Monday, organizers stated that it took 7 hours of driving along with individual hiking to escape the congested area.
When the ban was lifted because the dirt was partially dry, the event organizers still warned everyone to be extremely careful. The makeshift city faced tens of thousands of cars causing huge congestion and traffic. Fortunately, conditions on the road are looking to improve as the weather becomes sunnier throughout the rest of the week.
Due to the rushed evacuation, lots of equipment and belongings were abandoned at the site creating a huge mess. This has drastically affected the rural desert environment and surrounding areas more than it ever has before. This directly goes against the actual motto of the Burning Man Project which is “Leave no trace”. Even whole cars were left behind, calling for a massive cleanup to take place.
Hopefully updates to how the festival will take place in the future will change, since Nevada is expected to have much more frequent storms. Because of these future disruptions, the attendants who plan to continue to go to the Burning Man festival will have to take precautions to avoid creating the same mess they did this year. It’s imperative that the land is kept clean in order to keep the festival from getting shut down.
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