Burning Man Nightmare - Flooding, Thousands stranded in knee-high mud & a death

There is an investigation into a death at the Burning Man festival in Nevada, where thousands of visitors were left stranded when floods from storms blasted through the state's desert.

On Saturday night, the event's organizers shut down vehicular access to the counter-culture festival in the western US state.

Many attendees were barefoot or had plastic bags on their feet as they walked through the muck.

The partygoers were advised to stay put and conserve food, drink, and other resources.

According to local TV station KNSD, the Pershing County Sheriff's Office confirmed that a death occurred at the Black Rock City event but provided few other details, declining to identify the dead or provide the likely cause of death.

The festival's organizers urged attendees to maintain their composure on the Burning Man website and said the event was designed to withstand circumstances like the flooding. On Saturday night, they announced that mobile phone trailers would be dropped in several spots and that they would also briefly turn on the internet.

Additionally, shuttle buses were set up to transport visitors from Gerlach, a village about 8 kilometers (5 miles) from Black Rock City, to Reno, a city southwest of the event venue.

“Burning Man is a community of people who are prepared to support one another. We have come here knowing this is a place where we bring everything we need to survive,” the organizers said in a statement.

“It is because of this that we are all well-prepared for a weather event like this.”

Celebrity DJ Diplo shared a video of themselves inside the back of a fan's pickup truck on Instagram on Saturday night. He claimed that before catching a ride, they had toiled through the mud for 9.7km (6 miles).

The US Bureau of Land Management, which is in charge of managing the Black Rock Desert where the festival is taking place, has said that vehicle gates won't open for the duration of the event, which started on August 27 and was supposed to end on Monday.

The entry to the celebration was still locked, according to officials, and it wasn't immediately clear when attendees would be allowed to leave.

However, they held out hope that if the weather improved, trucks may depart by Monday night.

The information was released just before Saturday night's planned burning of a large wooden effigy, which served as the yearly event's big conclusion.

 

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