Volunteers at the sandbag factory

Thousands of volunteers form a human chain to move sandbags to the "front line" at Bitterfeld

BITTERFELD, Germany (CNN) -- Some of the locals call it Bitterfeld beach -- a sandbag factory that as fast, as hands and shovels can move, is building a town-saving stockpile.

The labour here is cheap, unless you are the one paying to be here. Barbara Rumenapp has put her gardening business on hold to help.

"We came here from Frankfurt, we saw it on TV," she told CNN. "It looked terrible. We just wanted to help."

Frankfurt is 600 miles away, about a six-hour car journey. With her boyfriend Mark, they have worked now for three straight days.

They are not the only ones. Thousands are turning out round-the-clock for this hand-to-hand combat -- 5,000 in Bitterfeld alone.

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It is Bitterfeld's worst flood on record and around one-eighth of the area is flooded. All the town's 16,000 residents have been evacuated.

Alongside the volunteers the real troops are hard at work too -- though 20-hour stints on the front line were not what these new recruits were expecting.

"We only joined last month. We just finished basic training and this is training of a different kind," says a soldier named Franz.

Maybe not quite "Apocalypse now," but certainly "emergency soon" if they cannot keep the levee bank standing.

And so either by hand or by helicopter they all deliver the sandbags that the beach continues to provide.

Thousands upon thousands of sandbags are now being made every day.

They are in such demand that they have quickly become the most valuable commodity around. They are really all this town has got to try to hold back the flood.

Except of course the people who, the longer they work, the more they want to do.

Rumenapp's boyfriend Mark said: "There are situations when you come close to crying when you see the people trying to save their homes and belongings. But it's completely useless."

Thankfully, so far, most of Bitterfeld has been defended from the water. Volunteer time, hessian sacks and a sea of sand... It can sometimes be amazing how things so cheap can be worth so much.