Since the rains started, Echuca resident John McCann has been working to stack his family's belongings on trestle tables and couches and bundle what he can out of the house.
"I feel sick, actually," Mr McCann said as he worked on Tuesday afternoon.
"Everything's going up. We've taken all our electrical stuff and taken it over to our nephew's place.
"The only fridge we've got is locked in the back of the ute across the road, because we've been told not to park on this side.
"It's not good. Not good at all."
Mr McCann is one of thousands of residents racing to respond to the rising Murray and Goulburn rivers, which could inundate up to 2,000 homes by as early as today.
Hundreds of people in the danger zones in the riverside town in the state's north, as well as Moama on the NSW side of the border and Barmah further east along the Murray, have been evacuated.
A 2.5-kilometre-long levee has been built to protect homes, lives and livelihoods from the rising Murray River in Echuca, where it is expected to reach levels not seen for 150 years.
Without the levee, and smaller walls like it, much of the town could be lost.
But Mr McCann's home and dozens others like it fall on the wrong side of the divide.
He lived through the 1993 floods and said in the decades since, governments could have built more protection "and they've just failed to do anything".
Nearby, Shelley Robertson's home should be protected by the flood wall.
"It's really sad," she told ABC Statewide Drive, thanking those who had worked to build the levee.
"I want to be happy that we're only going to get a little bit of water on our side.
"But they've more or less built a dam that will keep water in. But unfortunately, that dam's got houses in it."
Rain which battered the state last week and into the weekend has continued to feed the state's major river systems despite clear skies in recent days.
Along with communities along the Murray, people living near parts of the Wimmera, Avoca, Loddon and Goulburn rivers are still being issued with major flood warnings as waters recede slowly.
Bunbartha, Zeerust, Mundoona and Kaarimba, north of Shepparton, were the latest to be issued with evacuation warnings on Tuesday.
In Echuca, which already experienced the Campapse River breaking its banks over the weekend, residents remaining behind have been working tirelessly.
Long lines of volunteers have been working with Australian Defence Force personnel to sandbag shops and vital infrastructure.
About 50 volunteers turned up within minutes after a call went out to help create a sandbag wall behind a bakery on the shores of the Campaspe.
A volunteer who answered the call said, "yep, people are just turning up when needed".
The flooding in Echuca has been dubbed a one-in-1000-year flood event.
Tim Wiebusch from the Victorian SES urged people in the vulnerable areas to leave while it was still safe to do so.
"The flooding in and around from Barmah all the way to Echuca is going to be at levels that we haven't seen for some decades," he said.
"So we're really asking the members of the public to consider the need to move now.
"Now those evacuation warnings, we don't issue them lightly. We are asking people to move at least to their relief centres and the like as we are expecting that flooding to peak in that area in the coming days."
The Njernda Aboriginal Corporation has been busy cooking meals and putting care packages together for dozens of residents.
Up to 200 people from the Cummeragunja Indigenous community near Moama were evacuated over the weekend.
Communities faced with evacuation or weeks of isolation
On Tuesday, as the state took stock of the damage already caused, the warnings were stark — this was going to be a long few weeks.
"This is far from over," Premier Daniel Andrews said.
"We're going to see more rain, thousands of people with homes full of water, others who cannot go back because they have left and are now parted from their home."
Showers and thunderstorms were forecast over the northern parts of the Mallee from this afternoon and evening, with Bureau of Meterology forecaster Michael Efron warning they could bring more heavy rains, albeit less severe than days earlier.
Then from Thursday the rain activity is expected to move across more of the state, with localised heavy falls expected around the Great Dividing Range.
By Friday, the entire state could again experience a soaking, with the north-east expected to cop the worst of the storms.
The community of Kerang, about halfway between Echuca and Swan Hill, could be isolated for up to two weeks when the nearby Loddon River cuts off roads within the next week.
"If it's similar to 2011, that's what'll occur," Gannawarra Shire Council mayor Charlie Gillingham told ABC radio.
"Kerang will be an island. And there'll be water all around us."
The small town of Boort, south of Kerang, is surrounded by lakes which are usually idyllic holiday drawcards but could be the reason residents are cut off for up to a week.
Wendy James, the owner of the Boort Lakes Holiday Park, said the community had been "more organised than ever" in preparing for the floods.
"And we're hoping, praying, that the work that they're putting in now will mean that we'll get through it unscathed," she said.
