Rains have flooded communities since Thursday, but parts of the east coast went into crisis on Saturday when a large dam overflowed, contributing to swollen rivers and triggering flash floods.
On Monday, Prime Minister Gladys Berejiklian of New South Wales (NSW) announced that nearly 18,000 people have been evacuated from flood-stricken regions of the state, and locals took to social media to show that thousands of animals were also on the move.
Matt Lovenfosse posted Facebook updates from his family’s farm in Kinchela Creek, including the photo above.
“All the brown you can see are spiders trying to beat the floodwaters,” he wrote in the caption.
Lovenfosse grew up on the farm and told CNN that he experienced similar floods in March 2001 and March 2013. On both occasions, the floodwaters pushed spiders towards the house, the highest point on the site.
“It is still raining here and the flood water is still rising, the water is getting closer to our house,” said Lovenfosse. “It has to be inside by tomorrow morning and the spiders will be all over the house.”
However, Lovenfosse plans to stay in his two-story house.
“My family has lived here forever, I grew up here and we feel safe here,” he said.
Spiders aren’t the only animals to take refuge in the water, Lovenfosse added.
“The trees are full of snakes,” he said. “If you take the boat across the meadow, they’ll swim there and try to get to something dry, just like the spiders.”
That may sound like a nightmare to some, but Lovenfosse is unperturbed.
“I grew up here on the farm so I have always been around snakes, spiders and all the other animals so they don’t disturb me and usually we don’t cross too often, but when the flood comes they have to be somewhere dry be, ”he said.
“So many SPIDERS out of the flood water,” she wrote, alongside a video of hundreds of arachnids crawling over something like garage doors.
“They’ll climb on your legs to hide too,” read the caption.
The wet weather continues and Berejiklian predicts that more people will be evacuated.
“The situation is evolving, the heavy rains will continue and we are now seeing weather warning warnings for the Illawarra and the south coast,” she said.
“I don’t know a single moment in our state’s history where we had these extreme weather events so quickly in the midst of a pandemic,” she added. “So these are challenging times for New South Wales, but I think we have also shown that we are resilient.”