1 Flood refugees poured back into their precarious polder life Sunday, grateful their centuries-old dams held and glad to see their homes above water.
2 'You just feel powerless and scared of the water. It was really frightening,' said Klaas van Dee, who owns a woodcutting business in the village of Echteld near here.
3 'When we got back and saw a sign saying `Welcome Back To Echteld,' tears were streaming down my face.'
4 Sunday virtually all the rest of the 250,000 refugees from the flooding in the southeastern part of the nation were given the go ahead to return to their homes from evacuation centers and makeshift accommodations.
5 About 70,000 had been allowed to go home in previous days.
6 Returnees crowded roads pulling their most treasured belongings in trailers and campers.
7 Some evacuees had driven truckfuls of home furnishings onto high bridges to keep them dry. One bridge was lined with new cars parked there by a local auto dealer.
8 The stony silence that had enveloped this town of 33,000 since evacuation day Wednesday was broken at precisely 8 a.m. local time (0700 GMT) when a procession of returnees began beeping their horns in celebration.
9 Highway exits had welcome home signs put up by the police that had been manning the road blocks to keep the locals away from their endangered homes.
10 The flooding of the Maas and Waal rivers had threatened to wash away the hundreds of kilometers (miles) of dikes here and inundate cities and town in the below-sea level polder areas.
11 The flood threat triggered the greatest mass evacuation in Dutch history.
12 But given their age-old saga of battling the North Sea in the west and the river dikes in the east, most Dutch took the flooding with a grain of salt.
13 'We were surprised how this has been reported in America,' said Mies den Ambtman, after she returned Sunday morning to Tiel.
14 Dutch TV had carried interviews with passersby in New York about their impressions of the Dutch flood emergency.
15 'They thought the whole country would be under water if one dike broke,' said Den Ambtman.
16 In fact, no dikes did break, despite the enormous pressure of water plunging down from the earlier flooding and storms in Germany, France and Belgium.
17 But the threat, and the enormous pressure on the medieval network of dikes, pointed out the immediate need for political action to safeguard the region from a recurrence.
18 The government has pledged quick action to upgrade the area's 530 kilometers (328 miles) of earthen dikes, many of which showed serious weaknesses during the flooding.
19 The repair and reinforcement job is expected to cost hundreds of millions of guilders (dollars).
20 The return of the evacuees to their homes in Gelderland Province Sunday was orderly, with no traffic problems reported. Extra trains were scheduled to take some of the pressure off the region's highway system.
21 'There's no problem with traffic. There's a lot of people, but everything's going fine,' said Interior Ministry spokesman Ger Bodewitz.
22 Despite the all clear, the dikes were still under pressure with little geysers of water rising in the streets of nearby Ochten, over which looms an 800-meter (half-mile) section of dike that had to be reinforced with 15,000 sandbags over the weekend.
23 From his front door, truck driver Bertus Akkerman can seek the weak dike. He and his family stayed at a vacation bungalow after being evacuated.
24 'It was terrible,' he said. 'The kids loved it but we could only think about home. We were afraid for the whole time that the water would keep rising.
25 'My daughter Marjolein turned two on Friday and it was a miserable day so we're going to have another birthday for her tomorrow.
26 'It was a perfect feeling to get back and find the house all right.'

About 70 , 000 had been allowed to go home in previous days .
allowed to go home in previous days
Why were some people allowed to go home before others?