Mineros counts the ups and downs of rain in Burning Man – Gerais

This year’s edition of the Burning Man Festival, which took place in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada (USA), was marked by heavy rain and mud. Miners who took part in the event talk about the challenges they faced in the American desert. One had to walk for an hour and a half through thick mud, and another says he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to leave the camp if supplies ran out.

Problems caused by rain

The Belo Horizonte businessman says the rain “surprised everyone.” When it started raining he was at a party. And the desert sands, when in contact with the water, turned into something like mud that sticks to people’s shoes and causes jamming of the bicycles that the festival participants were traveling with.

Gabriel describes that the city specially prepared for the festival in the Black Rock Desert is “very big and very wide”, which made it necessary to use bicycles. However, because of the mud, it was only possible to move about on foot, and with great difficulty.

“It (mud) is sticky, so it becomes a lump and it is very difficult to move it,” says Dideo, who had to leave his bike and walk back to the campsite for an hour and a half. “All the bikes broke down, and everyone lost their bikes,” he adds.

On the other hand, when Gabriel realized it was about to rain, he left the party and went back to the trailer he had rented with two friends, where he saw people stuck in tents, tents flooded with water and items missing. However, the engineer reported that “people helped each other a lot” and that the challenges helped bring him and his friends closer.

The end of the nightmare

And so that no more people could enter the city created for Burning Man in the desert, the gates to the event were closed, trapping some 72,000 people. The participants were not able to leave the place until the end of the afternoon of last Monday (9/4). But then a new problem arose: overcrowding.

Gabriel states that some people have been parked for 15 hours in a line of cars. “There were many, many cars wanting to leave at the same time. The moment the sun came out and the ground started to dry, everyone decided to leave, which created a huge traffic jam,” he explained.

The 36-year-old is still thinking about what might have happened if they had been stuck longer at the festival. “If all 70,000 people were trapped there for a long time, eventually the food would run out and people wouldn’t find water. It would have turned into a really big disaster.” According to him, that was what people were worried about the most.