What started as a tongue-in-cheek Facebook post about building the “Great Wall of Condo” within minutes turned into a massive community effort for the flood-threatened town of Condobolin.

The approaching flood was met with an inundation of helping hands, and not to mention earth movers, shifting mounds of dirt, sandbags and plastic into a 1-2 foot makeshift levy bank that crosses about 2km of the Central West NSW town, west of Forbes.

“We had to get the community activated to help the town,” Condobolin State Emergency Service unit commander Susan Bennett said.

“We’re facing a level of water we’ve never seen in Condo and surrounds previously, 7.37 metres was the highest we’ve seen in 1952. The prediction is for 7.6 metres, at least a foot higher, which is a massive volume of water,” Bennett said.

Parts of the town have already been flooded; however, the mission now is to protect the centre of Condobolin so residents can continue to access food and services, with the water expected to reach the levy on Monday.

“People with diggers, earth movers, they’ve worked tirelessly to build this bank and try to hold back the water that’s coming to us, it’s a wonderful effort from the community,” Bennett said. “Truck and dog-load after truck and dog-load.”

Bennett said the call went out on Wednesday.

“I sort of probably had a grimace when I hit post, it was a tongue-in-cheek comment, [but] people just started descending on us ... a good couple of hundred,” she said.

“We’re a proud, self-reliant group of people who realise we’ve got to step up and look after ourselves.”

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Condobolin High School deputy principal Matt Heffernan told this masthead students from years 7 to 11 had been volunteering during their sports periods to help fill sandbags to bolster at-risk properties over recent weeks.

“The first day they filled six pallets in an hour,” he said of the student’s contribution. “A quarter of the school turned up to help.”

He said that while there was an air of apprehension in the town ahead of the projected peak, he was proud of the effort of the kids in his care.

“They didn’t have to turn up, it was all volunteers, but they wanted to. That’s the joy of living in a country town like this,” he said.