Tens of thousands of Burning Man 2024 participants had to wait up to ten hours to depart after a violent dust storm reduced visibility to barely 1.5 meters on the last day of the infamous desert festival.
As SFGate reports, swirling clouds of dust and sand prevented drivers from moving faster than a snail’s pace on Monday. The wind was so strong and fast that the dust irritated the skin of visitors unfortunate enough to be bare-legged. The storm apparently began Friday evening and grew more severe over the weekend.
Bad weather had already threatened to turn the festival into a repeat of the horror show that took place last year: around 12 hours of continuous rain forced the organizers to close their gates briefly on August 25th before the event had even begun.
Fatalities at Burning Man Festival: 32-year-old Leon Reece identified
Tragedy followed the flooding when a festival attendee died just hours into the first day. The woman has since been identified as 39-year-old Kendra Frazer of Seattle, but no cause of death has been officially announced and toxicology reports could take months to come through.
Meanwhile, local police have announced the arrest of several Burners for drug-related activities, including Samer Naouri, who faces further charges of kidnapping, disappearance and false imprisonment. However, it is not clear at this stage whether the latter alleged crimes took place at the festival itself or elsewhere.
Some attendees were fined tens of thousands of dollars in what appears to be an undercover operation targeting attendees who asked others for money to ride to the festival. Many of them said they were unaware that it is illegal under Nevada law to offer rides for cash without proper authorization.
Other reports say that up to 2,600 festival-goers had to pay for temporary medical evacuation this year, which may have been a wise decision considering one woman reportedly fell about 20 feet from a climbable festival artwork designed to resemble a sinking ship.
This comes after last year’s festival suffered unsold events for the first time in over a decade due to similar controversies – including a drug-related death, false rumors of an Ebola outbreak, torrential rains and reports of general mud chaos that even reached the president’s office.
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