Burning Man attendees share ordeal with urine bottles as clean-up begins after exodus – updates

The infamous gathering (it’s most definitely not a festival) just finished for another year – but what’s it actually like to pitch up for the full nine days?

Claire Dodd reports:

A California man likely died at the mud-impacted Burning Man festival from drug intoxication, a coroner’s office has said.

Leon Reece, 32, was found unresponsive on the remote and weather-hit Nevada festival grounds on Friday evening, according to authorities.

The exact cause and manner of Reece’s death are still pending but the Washoe County Medical Examiner’s Office said in a statement that drug intoxication was suspected.

Graeme Massie reports.

Elon Musk offered lofty praise to the Burning Man festival - after this year’s event descended into disaster with one person dead and thousands left stranded in the Nevada desert after intense floods.

“Burning Man is unique in the world,” Mr Musk wrote on his platform X. “Hard to describe how incredible it is for those who have never been. Best art on Earth.”

The post drew scrutiny for two reasons. First off, it came as the desert festival is suffering from utter chaos on all sides — torrential floods caused by Tropical Storm Hilary, false claims of an Ebola outbreak, tens of thousands of stranded attendees, and even a death caused by reasons “unrelated to the weather.”

On top of this mess, Mr Musk seemed to be commenting on a video from Paris Fashion Week in 2022 — not Burning Man.

Kelly Rissman reports.

Burning man attendees who managed to escape the festival after the washout said they were asked to ration food and urinate in bottles to save space in the portable loos.

Rob Price, a journalist with Business Insider, was a first-time “Burner” at this year’s festival. He writes that in the aftermath of the flooding, the generators failed and the fridges switched off.

The water systems for washing and showering also broke down within hours as the rain turned the mud ankle-deep.

And then there was trash, everywhere.

“The porta-potties were surrounded by a halo of shredded toilet paper that clung to shoes,” Price wrote.

“Despite the food rationing, the mandatory pee bottles, and the malfunctioning infrastructure, Burners, as they call themselves, scraped the dirt off their shoes and got down.”

It began with a fake screenshot on the social media platform X, and quickly spread across the internet and to tens of thousands trapped in swamp-like conditions at Burning Man.

The annual festival in the Nevada desert, plagued by tropical storms and mud that forced gate closures and festival goers to shelter in place, was at the centre of an Ebola outbreak, the bogus post claimed on Saturday 2 September.

A cursory glance at the social media account that published the doctored post from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would have revealed its long history of spreading tongue-in-cheek claims about “psyops” and oppressive government operations.

And yet conspiracy theorists quickly flooded the zone with unhinged posts about military aircraft landing in the Black Rock City area, and quarantine zones being set up.

Some were clearly in on the “joke”, others apparently not.

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A census of Burning Man attendees has found that most “Burners” were rich, white, straight men nearing their 40s.

The crowd remained mostly white at 80 per cent, according to the data from the 2022 festival.

The average festival-goer was a white, well-educated, heterosexual, 37-year-old Democrat with an average income of $100,000.

About 16 per cent of those present reported having household incomes of at least $300,000 a year, compared to only seven per cent of the attendees who reported such high incomes in 2013.

Over 50 per cent of the crowd identified as Democrats, while only 4.2 per cent said they were Republicans.

Bitcoin billionaire Brock Pierce has dismissed those who bailed on this year’s Burning Man due to flooding as “Coachella types”.

“I had my greatest Burn ever,” Mr Pierce told Page Six. “Because a bunch of people left or didn’t come, it was beautiful. You had only the strongest and most devoted,” he added.

Mr Pierce claimed that the annual gathering of nearly 80,000 people attracts hardcore followers, but also those “who don’t build [the festival’s structures] but come to experience the magic of the weekend, which are more Coachella types”.

“Not that there is anything wrong with that — they are in their process of learning and growing,” he added.

Who would have thought a small, yet peculiar creature could stir up such a scene in the Nevada Desert?

After heavy rains from Tropical Storm Hilary turned a dry desert into a mud pit, revellers at the Burning Man Festival were left trapped on site.

Footage on social media showed thousands of festivalgoers in the Black Rock Desert in damp, wet and muddy conditions.

And now, slowly marking its territory and sparking much discourse is a group of strange organisms known as the three-eyed “dinosaur shrimp”.

A local sheriff in Nevada has been forced to bat away wild conspiracy theories that continue spread online about Burning Man.

A wave of misinformation spread across Black Rock City and online on X, formerly known as Twitter, and TikTok, as the site turned into a washout over the weekend.

One of the biggest false rumours was that there had been an Ebola outbreak at the festival, with some conspirators claiming there had been multiple deaths from the disease.

Pershing County Sherriff Jerry Allen pushed back at this rumour in a statement about the event on Monday.

“In consultation with the Bureau of Land Management and the Burning Man Project, there is no validity to any reports regarding an Ebola outbreak, or any other disease,” he said.

Amelia Neath reports.