Burning Man Staffer Dies on Site of Annual Festival

Home Depot is cashing in on the annual Burning Man festival, where 65,000 hipsters and tech glitterati flock to the Nevada desert for music, art, drugs, and a frenzy of togetherness. Organizers are reporting swarms of insects and possible stink bugs that are covering equipment and personnel as they prepare for the annual event. “We had some winds yesterday and that might have blown some of the bugs, and then a lot of them are dying by hitting the hot lights at night”. According to a blog post on the official Burning Man website, the bugs are gathering inches-deep on Burning Man’s various structures and attacking all attendant humans, despite the relative absence of food or water.

So even though Burning Man is billed as an escape from modern-day capitalism, where people bring their own housing and food, money doesn’t change hands, and people gift things or barter with one another, the event still offers a seasonal windfall to a number of major American corporations. Nicely perhaps not all the rumors, however the bugs are actual. The week-long event was attended by nearly 66,000 people previous year. They’re tiny, so it’s not as grisly as it sounds, but it feels like a bug bite and leaves a welt.

Other pictures from the preparation for festival, which starts next week, show large green bugs coating tire wheels and other surfaces.

Pollack explained that it’s possible the bright lights used by crews setting up for Burning Man attracted the insects in large numbers.

“When you have got the rain occasion within the desert, two weeks or so later the desert blooms and the bugs will transfer in and grow to be lively”, he stated.

On the Burning Man blog, Cobra Commander (again, this is a real person at Burning Man) said that if the bugs don’t let up they’re going to have to “nuke the whole city”, which is kind of extreme and maybe just code for doing salvia.

Pollack said he thinks it’s likely that most of the swarms of bugs will disperse the by the time Burning Man gets fully underway.

“They’re not very long-lived”, he defined. “When those plants start to brown up, they’re going to disperse or die”.