Like death and taxes, mud and waiting are sort of the only two guarantees when it comes to a lot of music festivals, particularly if yours just so happens to be taking place out in a rural area between Atlanta and the Alabama border in the US.

This was the nightmare turned reality for punters attending the TomorrowWorld music festival over the weekend. As some fairly post-apocalyptic photos on social media show, thousands of revellers were left stranded overnight after organisers closed off the festival site due to wet conditions.

TomorrowWorld, which takes place on an 8,000-acre farm, became so bogged down that organisers stopped allowing shuttle buses, cabs, and Uber cars into the festival area to reach punters at checkpoints, leaving them stranded in the mud.

As Mashable reports, punters who weren’t camping on the festival site following Saturday night’s closing set from DJ Hardwell were forced to stand in the rain for hours, with some even sleeping in the mud, while others opted to walk between five and 10 miles to far-out checkpoints.

According to Billboard, organisers announced on Sunday that the festival would be accessible only to on-site campers, meaning only the 40,000 or so on-site campers were able to attend the the event’s third day, down from an estimated audience of 190,000.

“Continuous rainfall over the last three days has severely limited capacity of the parking lots, entrance roads and drop off locations in and around the festival site,” organisers wrote in a statement released early Sunday morning.

“The experience of the TomorrowWorld visitors is always number one priority, so TomorrowWorld was forced to close all daily parking lots and drop off locations. TomorrowWorld regrets that festivalgoers with day tickets, guest list tickets, and anyone not already camping at DreamVille will unfortunately not be able to access the festival.”

Understandably upset punters flooded social media with hellish accounts of being stranded without transportation, with many placing the blame squarely on the promoters for poor organisation and not taking potential weather conditions into account.

“It was unfair for them to tell us to ‘keep walking, there are shuttles a few miles down the road’ when they already knew all of them had been canceled,” Valeria Nolla-Maxwell aka EDMPocahontas told Mashable.

According to Nolla-Maxwell, after waiting two hours for a shuttle, she was told to trek several miles to the next checkpoint for more buses. When she discovered there were no more buses, her husband, who did not attend the event, had to come and pick her up at 7am.

“Ppl were walking through the woods just to exit. Im sure what they did was highly illegal. A riot was about to break out,” wrote one Reddit user. “Once in the parking lot, we waited two hours to get out. Fuck this festival. I wouldn’t be surprised if they got sued by a bunch of ppl.”

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