We just got back from a terrific weekend at Burning Flipside.

We brought a 10x10 Rugged Exposure "Deluxe Gazebo" (their emphasis quotes, not mine) to cover our cooking area. These are flimsy-looking things that you probably wouldn't want to use on the playa, but they're cheap and Flipside doesn't have very high winds. When a rainstorm came through, we noticed the gazebo wasn't waterproof - not surprising, since it's made of some sort of shadecloth - so we quickly cut up and duct-taped together half a dozen trash bags to make a nice waterproof cover that we threaded under the roof. This worked great, and it looked just the same from the outside.

That night there was a bigger storm, and the trash bags apparently accumulated a good load of water. Some time in the early morning, the legs buckled under the weight, and the shade structure was rendered into a twisted heap of metal. We were asleep; the neighbors across the road said it made a pretty dire collapsing noise followed by a prolonged sploosh of all that water departing.

Beware the power of engineering!

In the morning we packed up the shade structure remnants in trash bags except for the trash-bag-roof-cover, which we transferred to our tent roof, because also in the night we'd discovered that our tent's rain fly wasn't waterproof. The tent was evidently stronger than the shade structure, or maybe the trash bags were peaked enough to not accumulate water on the tent.

What did I learn from this? Evidently I didn't learn not to add waterproofing to existing structures. I believe I didn't learn anything at all.