Imagine rocking up to an outdoor music festival over the action-packed New Years period, only to face torrential rains that completely flooded the venue and trapped you onsite for days on end with a thousand other partygoers. Yep, it actually happened it northern NSW and the ravers in question have only just been released…

The Freakreation Festival took place on Boonoo Boonoo Island in Tenterfield, Northern NSW, kicking off last Saturday 5th January and scheduled to continue on until Monday. But the dance music fans that rocked up to enjoy the event’s selection of psytrance, techno and chillout were in for a nasty surprise: the dirt road entrance to the island had been washed away by raging floods. Steve Martin from the Regional State Emergency Service confirmed earlier this week that nobody would be going anywhere for at least a few days.

“There is about 5km of dirt road to the festival site that is like porridge at the moment, inaccessible to four-wheel or two-wheel drive vehicles,” he told News.com.au. “It’s going to take us at least 48 hours before we can grade and regravel the road with heavy machinery and repair a vehicle bridge to the festival site – weather permitting. There are about 500 cars at the site and it will be very slippery and boggy, slowly trying to get them out without churning up the road. It’s going to be organised chaos when we start getting them out.”

Helicopters with several tones worth of supplies were dropping fresh food, water, blankets and generator fuel to the site several times a day: with one of the drops allegedly waved in by a naked raver dancing nearby. But most important, they kept the tunes pumping. “They have sufficient supplies. They are staying calm and happy. The music is still going and they are still having a good time in the wet.”

But finally today, there was some raver salvation: rescue workers who had been working day and night since the weekend, had managed to clear an escape route to free all 1,000 of the stranded punters. “A couple of vehicles [have been] left in there but they are the ones that have been bogged too badly to get out or the owners have just abandoned them there and are going back later to pick them up,” Martin told ABC News. “I’ve even had callers from hire-car companies where the people have just walked in, dropped the keys on the desk and said, ‘Well, we couldn’t get out. There’s your keys.’”