AFPThe festival site with surrounding camps in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 20:51
Some 70,000 visitors to the Burning Man festival in the United States are forced to stay in their camps and to use their food and water sparingly due to heavy rains. The festival in the Black Rock Desert in the state of Nevada has been transformed into a water ballet by slowly passing rain showers.
Visitors to the normally dusty terrain now wade through a thick layer of slimy mud that is difficult for vehicles to move through. The organization of the free-spirited hippie walhalla in the desert will no longer allow car traffic for the time being. Aircraft are no longer allowed to land there. Black Rock City, as the ‘city’ the festival-goers are called every year, is closed. Entrances and exits to the site are closed.
The local daily newspaper Reno Gazette Journal reports that it seems that the mobile toilets can no longer be cleaned or emptied due to the muddy conditions.
Yours
“Everyone in Black Rock City, help each other stay safe,” the organization called for last night. “Stay prepared for bad weather conditions overnight and Saturday.” Visitors must use their water and food sparingly and are urged to take shelter “in a warm place”. Heavy rain is also expected in the area tomorrow.
Temperatures in the Nevada desert are lower than normal during the festival this year. The visitors, who often stroll scantily dressed for days on the hot sand plain, do so this year at around 20 degrees. In the evening the temperature drops to 10 degrees.
Bonfire
Festival Burning Man was created in 1986 as a celebration of the solstice, where a meter-high wooden man was set on fire by way of a bonfire. Since then, the event has grown into a massive annual desert festival. Tens of thousands of revelers, artists, hippies, anarchists and exhibitionists spend days building an experimental society in the desert during Burning Man.
It is not yet known whether the traditional burning of the meter-high wooden doll will continue tonight. It is also unclear whether the ‘temple’ that is built annually by festival-goers and set on fire at the end of the festival can be burned. Monday is the last day of the festival.
Guys Festival a Woodstock
International media compare this edition of Burning Man with, among other things, the flopped Fyre festival, where visitors stranded in the Bahamas in 2017 without food or an acceptable place to sleep. The extremely muddy edition of the Woodstock festival in 1994 is also recalled.
2023-09-02 18:51:21
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