Aviva Fried // Photo credit: Satellite image 2023 Maxar Technologies / AFP
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7:32 p.m., September 03, 2023
The Bruning Man alternative festival, which takes place in the Nevada desert in the United States, is inaccessible due to heavy rains which have turned the place into fields of mud. The organizers had to close the doors of the event. For the moment, no one can leave the premises or come there.
The participants of the American alternative festival Burning Man could no longer go to or leave the site on Saturday, installed in the Nevada desert, because of heavy rains which transformed the place into a field of mud and forced the organizers to close the doors. . “The gates and the airport of Black Rock City (the name of the site, editor’s note) remain closed, any entry or exit is delayed until further notice”, repeated at regular intervals since midnight the account X (ex-Twitter) of Burning Man.
The organizers also invited participants already there to “conserve water, food and fuel and find a warm and safe shelter”. Due to the heavy showers, “la playa”, a huge esplanade characteristic of the event, was made impassable. If the rains stopped during the day, they should be back on Sunday, the last day of the festival, while temperatures overnight from Saturday to Sunday should drop to around 10 degrees, again according to the organizers’ account.
An event already faced with difficult weather conditions
The majority of the planned activities have been suspended, including the firing of the wooden giant installed in the center of “la playa”, which marks the end of the festival and gives it its name. The festival had been confronted last year with an intense heat wave with strong winds which had already made the experience difficult for the “burners”, name of the festival-goers. Launched in 1986 in San Francisco, Burning Man aims to be an indefinable event, somewhere between a celebration of the counter-culture and a spiritual retreat.
Initially organized on a beach in San Francisco, Burning Man has become a structured festival, with a budget of nearly $45 million (2018 figures) and more than 75,000 participants in the last edition, down from the previous one in 2019 It has been held since the 1990s in the Black Rock Desert, a protected area in northwest Nevada that organizers are committed to preserving.