It’s 11:30 pm and we’re sitting cross-legged on the cold ground in the middle of a salt flat in Nevada. An emergency siren sounds off…1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 times. A hazy smoke spreads across the ground. Then fireworks shoot up into the air… over and over, lighting up all the faces around us… then silence.
All the faces around us look up with expectation.
Then comes a massive explosion. As far away as we are from it, we feel an intense heat on our faces as a fireball shoots out of a tower far into the air above it, forming into a massive mushroom cloud of flame. As the cloud dissipates, jets of flame shoot out of the ground with such intensity that a loud whistling sound follows. The jets of fire finally quiet and the remains of the tower burn slowly away. This is Burning Man - a gathering of over 40,000 people in a Nevada desert - and this was our final activity prior to leaving yesterday. More pictures and stories of my 4 days at Burning Man to follow!
(Pre-explosion fireworks with 2 safety personnel in the foreground.)
(The Mushroom Cloud. For scale, note the tower is over 6 stories tall! The fireball was created from salvaged jet fuel)
(The crowd lit up by the fireball.)
According to the engineer on the ground- the explosion was from 2200 pounds of Propane and 80 (or 800, it was loud and I was wearing high-noise headphones) pounds of accelerant. And they used less than they planned. And they already moved the perimeter back to 700 feet from 500 feet the night before. Breathtaking...
Posted by: That guy in Reseda | Sep 11, 2007 at 12:38 PM
Thanks for that added information! As we sat in the front row, we were somewhat wondering 'if this hasn't been done before, how safe is it to be in the front row?' ;)... I'm glad to hear they moved the perimeter back as well, as the heat from that explosion was intense even at 700ft out!
- Heida
Posted by: Heida Biddle | Sep 12, 2007 at 08:50 AM