Tens of thousands of Burning Man 2024 participants faced delays of up to ten hours getting off-site after a vicious dust storm reduced visibility to barely five feet on the last day of the infamous desert festival.
Billowing plumes of grit and sand kept drivers from inching along at more than a glacial pace on Monday, SFGate reports, with winds blowing hard and fast enough for the dust to sting the skin of any attendees unfortunate enough to have gone bare-legged. The storm apparently started up on Friday night before gathering steadily over the weekend.
Bad weather had already once threatened to turn the festival into a rerun of the horror show that engulfed last year’s event, with around 12 hours of non-stop rain forcing organizers to briefly close their gates before things had even kicked off on Aug. 25.
The deluge was swiftly followed by tragedy when a festival participant died mere hours into the first day. The woman has since been identified as 39-year-old Kendra Frazer, from Seattle, though no cause of death has been officially reported and it could be months before toxicology reports are concluded.
In the meantime, local police have announced the arrest of several Burners for drug-related activity, including Samer Naouri, who faces further charges of kidnapping, abduction and false imprisonment, though it isn’t clear at this stage if the latter alleged offenses took place at the festival itself or elsewhere.
Some participants have apparently also been fined tens of thousands of dollars by an undercover sting operation targeting Burners who charged others for a lift to the festival, many of whom claim to have been unaware that offering rides for cash without the proper permits is illegal under Nevada law.
Other reports suggest up to 2,600 festival goers had this year shelled out for temporary medevac coverage, perhaps a prudent move given a woman is understood to have fallen around 20 feet from a climbable work of festival art designed to look like a sinking ship.
That’s after a similar raft of controversies at last year’s festival—which included a drug-related death, false rumors of an Ebola outbreak, torrential downpours and reports of general mud-related chaos that even reached the president’s office—had seen this year’s event fail to sell out for the first time in over a decade.
