Good thing the Burning Man organizers didn’t get their way when they petitioned the Bureau of Land Management to increase their allowed attendance to 100,000 back in 2019.
I’m all for promoting free-spirit, off-the-grid arts events but this thing has long outgrown the limits of how many people can come together in one place without causing huge safety concerns and environmental damage. Maybe the solution is to break Burning Man up into a series of smaller events at different locations instead of trying to gather a city’s worth of people in a single place that doesn’t have the infrastructure to handle them.
That’s great, but it doesn’t help with the problem unless they put a hard cap on the attendance for the big gathering in Black Rock City. They really ought to scale this thing back down to a fraction of its current size. There’s a reason human civilizations tended to be capped at a certain population density before people invented paved roads and sewage systems.
Uh, missed the part where they walked 5 miles? Maybe everyone else would have to regular-hitchhike instead of fan-hitchhike from there, but it’s not like they had a helicopter pick them up.
Yeah, given the situation, it sounds like anyone who is able to pack themselves out (and not leave their garbage for others to clean up) is doing the responsible thing. The less people stuck there requiring resources or rescue, the better.
Commentary on the ethics of attending Burning Man aside, can anyone here speak to the reason for closing the exits? I would think that if you’re able to extract yourself from that situation, that would be the prudent course of action, right? Are they worried about vehicles getting stuck and blocking the roads out, or folks abandoning their gear and leaving it for the organizers to dispose of? Even if that’s the case, if it’s truly an emergency situation, people should be permitted to leave if they’re able, IMO.
Because it’s all mud. There are no “exits” so to speak, there’s just a commonly agreed section of path that people call a road that points to the main roads tens of miles away. And all of those paths and areas are muddy, flooding, and in some cases dangerous. When the mud solidifies, it’ll harden into basically cement like stuff. Then cars will be stuck there, and blocking the commonly travelled paths.
It’s in the middle of nowhere. People who go off in disparate directions MAY not get found for a long time.
I wouldn’t like to drive even the most robust rigs out through the bottom of a flash-flooded lake bed. Shit, I’ve seen ex military 6WD vehicles get stuck one a muddy festival site in the south west of England. (not the Alvis Stalwart though. That thing was, well, in it’s element).
The only way most of those vehicles get out is if the mud dries flat enough for a conventional automobile to drive on. Turning the whole area into deep muddy ruts would be counterproductive for the overall exit strategy even if a few vehicles did manage to get out in the short term (not to mention the extra problems that come with vehicles getting stuck on the way out).
Yep. Here in Oz, anyone driving in the desert knows that when there’s rain on an unsealed desert road, there’s no driving for days. You won’t make it, and you’ll trash the road trying. Basically, unless there’s pavement under your wheels, wherever you are is where you’ll be for the next week or two.
ETA: well, not everyone here knows.
You can see the repairs the road is going to need. And digging that beast out is going to be a challenge. At least the driver got it off to the side on this occasion.
I haven’t been really keeping up with this, but I have a question that is probably answered somewhere. How did this rain seemingly take everyone by surprise? Was it a predictable weather event, or did it happen out of the blue ? I’m not judging, I’m genuinely curious.
It’s an offshoot of the tropical storm that hit LA last week.
So, yes, it kinda was a surprise in intensity, but no, it shouldn’t surprise people in general. This is the world we’re in now, these types of weather events will happen more and more. I hope the people who go to Burning Man think about this being the new possible normal and not a one off event.
Also I imagine many attendees aren’t in a position to just walk out and abandon their own vehicles and campsites without worrying if and when they’ll get that stuff back.
To add to @anon85524460 this area usually gets no more than eight inches of rain in a year. This storm brought six inches in one day, right when the event was kicking off.
Speaking of which, does anyone know why that storm was called a hurricane rather than (being in the Pacific) a typhoon? Obviously I could google this but I choose not to.
