As thousands of people remain unable to leave the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert after heavy rains inundated their campsites with ankle-deep mud Saturday, authorities say they are investigating a death at the event.
Attendees were told to shelter in place in the Black Rock Desert and conserve food, water and fuel after a rainstorm swamped the area, forcing officials to halt any entering or leaving of the festival.
The remote area in northwest Nevada was hit with 2 to 3 months worth of rain – up to 0.8 inches – in just 24 hours between Friday and Saturday mornings. The heavy rainfall fell on dry desert grounds, whipping up thick, clay-like mud that festivalgoers say is too difficult to walk or bike through.
0.8 inches…
Funny how so little fucked them so much!
They’re also at the lowest drainage point for that whole valley. Plus, the properties of the lakebed make it so that water is very slow to soak into the ground, so it’s going to take a while for things to dry out.
That dry lake bed is like powdered mud, it’s so fine that any water instantly makes mud.
Hey, 0.8 inches is completely acceptable and it gets the job done. It’s not the size of the dingy but the motion in the ocean…or in this case it’s not how much you fill the graduated cylinder but how dry the soil is.
On a more serious note, this has the potential to become a huge tragedy; there are 10’s of thousands of people out there with limited resources and more rain is coming. I hope that things stay under control.
Burning man is held on a dry lakebed, funny thing about lakes is that they tend to form in the places water naturally tends to accumulate, it just happens that it’s a desert, so normally there’s no rain so no water. So basically any rain that falls in the area tends to drain to the burning man playa, while only .8" fell directly on burning man, a decent amount more accumulated there.
The soil there also tends to turn to mud, and there’s no real plants with root systems and such to help hold it together.