Residents of a rural Australian city are frustrated by a fast-growing tumbleweed called hairy panic that is piling up outside their houses, covering lawns and blocking doors and windows.
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According to 7 News, residents’ homes have been smothered by the wandering seed heads of Panicum effusum, aka hairy panic – a common grass species found across Oz. Outbreaks of the weed take place across the country every year but Wangaratta has been hit bad this year due to drier than average conditions.
Exhausted residents say they spend hours clearing their properties, only for the relentless weed to return the next day.
The spokesman said hairy panic would go wherever the wind blows, and clarified again that it was not something that the council “can stop from happening”.
In January 2014, tumbleweed in a town in the USA state of New Mexico covered homes and blocked streets, and just two months later, towns around Colorado Springs were also swamped.
The local council is refusing to get involved, as although the weeds are dry and piled high, they’re not deemed enough of a fire risk to bother getting the emergency services in to hoover them up with their… massive emergency vacuum cleaners.
It is believed that much of it originated in a paddock that was left untended by a local farmer.
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This is not the first time that a town has been inundated by tumbleweed.
