This year’s Burning Man Festival in Nevada has been washed out and 70,000 attendees are stuck in the mud. Summer rains have hit its desert location and, as we regularly find in the Australian Outback, when fine and dusty desert soils get wet, they are like glue. Transport becomes near impossible.
A large number of people are temporarily stuck at Burning Man and there are issues with emergency vehicle access. While it’s been reported a man has died at the festival, organisers say it was “unrelated to the weather”. However, the problem is not flooding, but rather mud and not being able to move.
This has created a media storm – but it is not a natural disaster of the severity of the recent fires in Hawaii and Greece, or the floods in Spain.
