Mud season nightmare: A VPR host was stranded for 7 hours on a rural road. She barely survived.


By Ethan Weinstein
Apr 7 2022, 6:46 PM

Nearly three weeks after Linda Radtke’s mud season disaster, she was still finding mud in her ears.

Radtke, host of VPR’s ‘Choral Hour,’ spent seven hours overnight stuck on a soupy dirt road in Middlesex. It was unseasonably warm that evening, but the temperature was falling fast. Less than a mile up the road lay Radtke’s husband, Bob Jervis, sick in bed with a fever. Both of them requested towing service. It never arrived.

Finally, sometime after 4 in the morning, a tow truck driver discovered Radtke after receiving a call from state police about an abandoned vehicle. She hung inverted out the driver’s side window. She was freezing, unconscious, her mouth in the mud.

Radtke’s doing better now, undergoing rehabilitation at the Fanny Allen Campus of the University of Vermont Medical Center. She even expects to return home on Saturday — far more quickly than anyone expected.

But the question remains: What exactly happened on the night of March 17?

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