Burning Man was reignited over the past week for the first time since 2019, and it lived up to its reputation of being the most unique and experimental event one can possibly attend in the middle of the Nevada desert. But the festival takes a lot of intensive behind-the-scenes labor to run smoothly, much of which isn’t for the faint of heart. That’s where people like Zach come in.
Zach, who has requested to go by his first name only for fear of retaliation from his employer, made his way to the Black Rock Desert from his home in Texas to spend each day of the festival cleaning Burning Man’s hundreds of portable toilets. He’s worked as a field development specialist for two years doing this type of work, but this was his first time tackling the playa.
Zach gained some online recognition for the work he did at the event after posting on Reddit, inviting members of the forum to “ask him anything.”
“We had a really good crew in the trenches. Everyone was there to work and willing to help each other out. I can’t speak to previous burns, but I can speak to other events I’ve serviced, and this was by far the best team I’d been a part of,” Zach commented in the thread.
He said work for him and his team went from 5 am to 9 pm every day, with several breaks in between. Cleaning out the toilets involved suctioning out trash and waste and sanitizing the units using degreaser, descaling solution and blue chemical tablets before hosing them all down.
“You’re looking at each team cleaning probably anywhere from 200 to 300 toilets a day,” Zach told SFGATE.
The toilets weren’t the only thing Zach had to clean up over the course of the event — at one point, he had to hose off a woman who fell into a portable toilet’s holding tank.
“She was wearing knee-high boots with 5-inch heels on them and squatting over the bowl instead of sitting on it. I guess she lost her balance and just stepped her foot straight into the bowl, and that s—t was filled up to the top,” Zach said.
Zach braves a dust storm at Burning Man.
Image courtesy of Reddit user FreelancevagrantARS.At one point, medics informed Zach that he had potentially saved a man’s life after finding him unconscious inside a portable toilet.
“I was pounding on the door, and I didn’t hear an answer, so I kept hitting on it and still didn’t hear anything. I pulled the door back a bit, just to see if someone was in it, and there was somebody there. About every minute or so I’d look at that door just to see if they’d come out of it yet,” he said.
When Zach’s team had finished cleaning the area and whoever was inside still hadn’t come out, her ripped the portable toilet’s door off its hinges and found someone passed out inside without any clothes on. He immediately woke the man up and began giving him water while waiting for medics to arrive.
“I had to keep the door open, so I’m trying to block people from seeing this naked dude half alive in the toilet,” Zach said. “I’m keeping him awake, just trying to talk to him, and then eventually the medics get there. They’re all like, ‘I’m really glad you guys found him. It would’ve been really bad if you didn’t.’”
Despite these incidents, Zach said working Burning Man was generally a positive experience, and his work didn’t go ignored — several people on Reddit mentioned noticing that the event’s toilets were taken care of especially well this year.
“I was remarking to my friends that I was really impressed with how clean the portos were this year,” one commenter said. “They didn’t even smell that bad.”