Yesterday, we showed the first pictures of what a 70km/h windstorm can do to an installation at Burning Man. Here are some more pics!

First, we went over to check more closely on Mirror Blaze. We found that the emergency door had blown in, but that’s fine, as the structure was sound, and the emergency exit is supposed to open easily, anyway:

Also, dunes!:

With Mirror Blaze under control, we continued on our quest to bring back information about the other installations. Next up was the wall that had fallen on one of the sets of propane storage tanks (my bike for scale). This was the worst of it (and really not bad at all). It just needed a couple of people to lift the wall up (it had gotten impaled on one of the fence posts). The propane tanks were in no real danger. The wood that had fallen was pretty light (looks like normal <1" plywood to me), but we were still very glad that propane tanks are designed well: [caption id="attachment_1866" align="alignnone" width="604"] This is why we build so many safety features into propane tanks and fire art installations.[/caption]

Zooming in, you can see why propane tanks have those metal guards on the top, along with the huge (guarded) regulator apparatus for the four 100-lb tanks you see:

Continuing on to Riskee Ball, we found a ‘deadman switch‘[1] which was attempting to live up to its name:

I checked the back side of Riskee Ball, and it looked fine (as far as I could tell) with the aluminum lane backing failing safe and blowing out to allow the wind to pass through:

Our survey complete, we decided to head back to camp to report our findings. We were guided on our path by the dirigible fleet:

Along the way, we found some booty blowing in the wind, which was appropriately claimed by the Totenkitten Empire:

Stopping in camp to rest and let some of the wind blow over, we received this useful notification:

We also ran into this hardcore niceguy:

Also, Magill and Carl were outside contemplating the wind and dust:

Next time, we’ll look at some things you can use to help you deal with dust storms!

[1]’Dead Man’s Switch’es are standard on fire installations. A human operator must be pressing on the switch at all times during operation, or fire will not happen. This is generally done through a mechanical switch or optical isolator to prevent an electrical short from circumventing the switch.