utopia hippy for the rich at the Burning Man festival, held every end of summer in the Black Rock desert in Nevada (United States), this past weekend it ended up being turned into a huge mud trap for its tens of thousands of attendees. One person has died and up to 70,000 participants, according to CNN, have been trapped as a result of a biblical storm that hit the place on Saturday, turning it into an impassable quagmire that made it impossible for vehicles to circulate and forced those who wanted to leave the venue. to walk up to 10 kilometers through the mud.
The police have announced the opening of an investigation into the death, of which no further details have been released at the moment. The authorities, who issued a recommendation to those trapped on Saturday afternoon to “keep food, water and fuel, and to take refuge in a dry and safe space”, were confident that they would be able to get out throughout this Monday, Day Labor Day, a public holiday in the United States. It was the originally scheduled closing day. The organizers reported on the internet that the start of the evacuation of the vehicles was scheduled for the end of Monday morning, but the agency Reuters collected testimonials from attendees who spoke of “a constant flow of cars since before dawn.”
The central act, the burning of a gigantic anthropomorphic structure that symbolizes the purification of the community of attendees and which gives its name to the festival, had to be postponed, given the muddy circumstances. It should have caught fire, as usual, on Saturday night.
Burning Man is an event halfway between a countercultural festival and a spiritual retreat that has become over the years a great capitalist circus, a playground for celebrities, influencers and members of the Silicon Valley community of aspiring techies. Created in 1986 in San Francisco by a group of inspiration posthippy, since the nineties it has been organized in the Nevada desert, in a protected area in the northwest of the State, tens of kilometers from any inhabited place. What will be the environmental impact of the disorderly exit that the elements have forced this year is the big question that will emerge from the dried mud, once the situation is under control.
The participants, who access the area with their own vehicles, spend thousands of dollars in a long weekend and build an ephemeral city, have to bring their own supplies with them. Perhaps due to the economic and logistical efforts required, it is also one of those events aspirational, widely disseminated on social networks such as Instagram. This year, the videos, which showed a huge mud flat and stuck vehicles, did not make you want to be there.
The news networks turned Sunday into a live broadcast of that huge traffic jam of 4X4s and huge motorhomes stuck in the mud. On Monday, CNN’s field connections took on a lighter tone, even close to humorous, as the situation was considered under control.
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It was an incredibly harrowing 6 mile hike at midnight through heavy and slippery mud, but I got safely out of Burning Man. Never been before and it was fantastic (with brilliant art and fabulous music)…except the ending. pic.twitter.com/jhxsOfNp5y
—Neal Katyal (@neal_katyal) September 3, 2023
Some attendees told that the most patient had decided to wait in the original venue, where the party was still going on. The most restless, such as the lawyer Neal Katyal, a regular on the opinion pages of the washington post, They started walking, leaving behind the feeling of community that inspires the appointment, to reach the only practicable road, located about eight kilometers from the place. “It has been an incredibly exhausting walk that we started at midnight through deep and slippery mud, but I managed to get out safe and sound,” he said on his X account, formerly Twitter. “It was like cement that stuck to the boots and acted like quicksand.”
no toilet paper
So did comedian Chris Rock and musician Diplo, two of the celebrities who attended the festival this year. Both managed to cover the path that separated them from the exit through the quagmire. As the latter explained, a good Samaritan with a truck prepared for the circumstances picked them up and took them out of there. In his case, there was a professional obligation in the background. “I walked on the side of the road for hours hitchhiking because I have a show in Washington tonight. [por la del sábado] and I didn’t want to disappoint anyone,” Diplo explained on Instagram to his 6.2 million followers. He got it, after all, and at dawn he was DJing for three hours at a club in the northeast of the US capital called Echostage. Rock, one of the most famous and irreverent comedians in the United States, also documented the couple’s adventures in one of those short-lived Instagram videos.
In statements to the France Presse agency, another of the attendees, a Dutch national, joined those who decided to leave the place “whatever it was”. “I was afraid of what could happen to me; there was no food, no water, no toilet paper; so I understood that I had to manage ”, she added. The woman managed to flee in a neighbor’s car, with which she managed to leave the mud festival.
The local authorities have asked for patience to let things take their course; the ground becomes solid and the movements safe. The most pessimistic calculations warn that tens of thousands of people could be blocked until Tuesday or Wednesday if the rains return.
A White House spokesman has assured this Monday that the president of the United States, Joe Biden, who had to celebrate Labor Day in a meeting with unionists in Pennsylvania, has been informed of the situation at all times. “Participants must follow the instructions of the national and local authorities; as well as those of the organizers of the event ”, has advised that spokesman.
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