Mobile phones, bags and various forms of identification are the top three items revellers are likely to lose at a festival, and the organisers of Burning Man have recovered 2,475 items, half of which have been collected.
The Journal Gazette reported that the eight-day Burning Man festival, which took place in late summer in Nevada, has had some highly unusual missing items reported or found and tries to reunite as many belongings as possible with their owners.
If you are organising a big event, then as well as planning events plumbing, it is good advice to have a dedicated Lost and Found tent or desk. And hopefully nothing will be reported because it was lost while using the facilities.
Even so, those in charge of the festival toilets will likely as not be optimistic about the situation, just like Burning Man’s Mike Kivett, who is in charge of the restrooms at the festival.
He said festivals have “a good vibe”, which is why when a colleague lost his phone and felt sure he would never see it again, Kivett told him to have faith. Sure enough, the phone was returned within two hours.
“We have about a 60 per cent return rate,” said Terry Schoop, Burning Man’s chief of recovery operations.
As well as 570 bags, 582 phones and 529 IDs, Burning Man’s lost and found list for 2017 includes a marching band hat, a furry animal print vest, a headdress with horns, a chainmail loincloth, as well as 200 shirts, 100 jackets, 50 pairs of spectacles and a pair of fire nunchucks.
