Fierce dust storm unleashes chaos at Burning Man festival: Watch

A powerful dust storm has struck Nevada's annual Burning Man festival, wreaking havoc on attendees’ campsites and trapping incoming Burners in up to eight hours of stop-and-go traffic.

The National Weather Service has issued warnings about fierce dust storms beforehand. But by Saturday, Burners were moving towards Black Rock City.

The highly-anticipated gathering began on Sunday in the Black Rock Desert, 100 miles north of Reno. Unfortunately, the event was rocked by strong winds and dust storms, halting festival activities, tearing apart tents, and reducing visibility to nothing.

The video showed multiple men fully covered in dust and dragged away by the strong wind currents, trying to weigh down metal poles.

According to a spokesperson for the festival, the winds reached a shocking 70 kph for a sustained time period.

During the massive dust storm, one major art installation was damaged, featuring an 8-ton inflatable thundercloud known as “Black Cloud”. The art piece was created by a Ukrainian-led team to symbolize the “specter of world war.”

Austin Matthew, an art creator at Burning Man, told Fox Weather, “There are some of the structures that are blown over, things have broken. And even just driving to our camp spot, there were all camps that were pretty much wiped out. Things were just laying on their side, completely annihilated at that point.”

Burning Man festival is an annual event that builds a temporary city, Black Rock City focusing on art, culture, and radical self expression.

The festival, which runs through September 1, draws 70,000 attendees each year.