What’s the worst music camping festival nightmare you can think of? Forgetting your tent pegs? Rocking up to the event realising you’ve forgotten your ticket? Pretty annoying, but it could be worse.

Headliners pulling out? Getting busted by sniffer dogs? Something involving the dreaded festival portaloo?

How about being stranded at a cancelled festival days after it’s actually finished without food and water?

Thousands of attendees of the Hudson Project music festival experienced just that after freak weather and torrential railed not only to the third and final day of the New York event being axed, but the Red Cross being called in after campers were trapped in a hellhole of mud and flooding.

Headlined by The Flaming Lips, Kendrick Lamar, and Modest Mouse, the inaugural edition of the Hudson Project promised to be quite the experience, offering gourmet food and craft beverages, camping, art installations, workshops, greenthumb initiatives, workshops, and even mobile phone charging stations and a public screening of the Brazil World Cup final.

While things started off well, with punters enjoying a bill featuring Flying Lotus, Mat & Kim, Bonobo, and a DJ set from Moby on the picturesque green hills of Hudson Project’s site in the forest region of Saugerties, New York, the third and final day (on Sunday 13th July) saw the festival begin to be ravaged by a torrential rain storm.

A weather alert issued by organisers asked attendees to evacuate the festival grounds (at around 4:45pm ET) on recommendation from the national weather service, instructing patrons to “seek shelter in your vehicles during the storm” and to keep away “from trees and any structures and calmly head to the nearest exit and follow direction from event staff and police.”

Following consultation with New York State officials and local police, the Hudson Project’s final performances – including headliner Bassnectar, STRFKR, Infected Mushroom, and Paper Diamond – were cancelled.

According to the Times-Herald Record, a handful of tractor drivers attempted to tow vehicles out of the bog, some being charged $60-$100 for the privilege while others alleged that little food or water was being provided to the trapped people.

Meanwhile on Twitter, the festival’s staff were being brutalised for their lack of hospitality and organisation once the bad weather hit, quickly renaming the event #MudsonProject.


As an excellent first-hand account of the entire ordeal by Consequence Of Sound‘s Killian Young details, many festival-goers were dissatisfied with the evacuation and rescue efforts, criticising the lack of an emergency plan or preparation.

“I can acknowledge that the weather is beyond anyone’s control, but there were such enormous and frustrating lapses in communication that I actually felt unsafe since,” writes Young. “The worst part was that the staff seemed to be the first to disappear.”

Following their social media being flooded with angry complaints and sharp criticisms throughout the incident, Hudson Project organisers MCP Presents and SFX Entertainment, are now offering partial refunds to ticket buyers, as Billboard reports. “We know this doesn’t fix the inconveniences caused by weather but we hope this helps,” wrote MCP Presents in a Facebook post on Tuesday. “It was a very unfortunate ending to an amazing event.”

A much longer-winded and hugely apologetic post appeared this morning – admitting that “some staff acted inappropriately” and even offering an online survey to “give everyone a proper forum to voice their comments and have them addressed by the right people.”

“After more than a full year of pouring our hearts and souls into creating an event that was built around the core of a positive fan experience, we know we fell short in some aspects,” the statement reads. “We are reading all your comments and complaints and will be addressing them internally, as well as taking all of them into consideration as we plan next year’s event.”

The post concludes: “congratulations on surviving the MudsonProject. We have a feeling you will never forget it…we know we won’t.”

Maybe the whole debacle was a case of history repeating itself; as Billboard points out, the Hudson Project was held on Winston Farm in Saugerties, New York – the same place that Woodstock’s famously unhinged 1994 revival took place, ending in 350,000 attendees descending into a muddy hellhole of debauchery.

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