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Burning Man festival-goers trapped in desert as rain turns site to mud
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Rain outs like this are pretty common at these festivals. The difference here is that I guess it is a bit harder to leave and more remote? I'd say 20% of the festivals I've been to have had some degree of mud issue resulting in some degree of infrastructure breakdown.
Burning Man is in a dry alkali lakebed way out in the middle of nowhere. Normally it's extremely hot and dry the entire time, the ground isn't dirt but a very fine powder that blows everywhere. When it rains that fine powder turns into this incredibly sticky mud and it becomes extremely difficult to move. It's quite a bit different than your standard muddy field kind of experience.
It's almost as if 70K people shouldn't be out there...
Because there's no infrastructure, leading to less than an inch of rain causing chaos? Did you read the article?
This mindset leads to no one doing anything interesting ever.
Skiing, sailing, scuba diving...none of it makes any real sense as the environments do not tend to have much infrastructure for human survival. But I can't imagine life without any illogical recreational activities such as these. It's fun.
Do you... think people don't live in the mountains? Or that a tiny amount of rain will sink a boat?
That's... only something someone from Southern California would think. Rain won't hurt you unless you stupidly pack tens of thousands of people into an area with no infrastructure.
I was talking about things like backcountry skiing, which I do for fun. But I'd even apply the same to a ski resort where bad weather can shut down gondolas and leave people stranded up top. And while SoCal sure sounds nice, I actually live in the mountains myself... in Canada. A place where unexpected heavy rain actually washed out a few highways last year and leaving many people stranded in previously well connected communities. Similarly, unexpected inclement weather does sink recreational boats somewhat often... which is exactly what the situation at burning man is: (very) unexpected weather.
My point was that it is a 'for fun' event in an environment not meant for humans to set up permanent infrastructure, and that's ok.
They brought plenty of "infrastructure". Shelter, generators, food, water, sanitation facilities, etc. Yeah, the mud sucks, but you're really being dramatic about the situation.
While I agree with this, I think the festival is big enough that they need to start considering improving the roads. Even just slapping down some plywood sheets where the roads are would probably be better than what's currently going on. This time it sounds like everyone's gonna be fine, but what about next time?
Apparently because it's alkali dirt, it leads to nasty wounds if it stays on skin for a while. Even in a dry year, people were supposed to use vinegar to clean dust off themselves so it wouldn't cause problems. Who wants to bet that many of the people covered in mud didn't have enough vinegar, or maybe didn't even have any.