1 The front in the Dutch war against the flood has moved to this small town with soldiers and divers patching a deteriorating dike early Thursday after an all-night emergency operation.
2 'We still do not have a guarantee that the dike will hold,'said Mayor Henrik Jan Zomerdijk.
3 Another thousand dump trucks of sand were coming in Thursday to reinforce the weakened 800 meters (half mile) of dike.
4 'As long as the water keeps up its high level, we have a critical situation.'
5 The dikes loom high over this Gelderland Province town of 5,000, virtually all of whom have joined the estimated 250,000 water refugees fleeing the southeastern Netherlands for high ground.
6 More than 30 boats were commandeered for the operation.
7 The church bells were chiming in Ochtend Thursday morning, but none of the townspeople were there to listen.
8 The only other sound was the heavy rumble of trucks carrying sand to reinforce the dikes.
9 The situation remained critical, with the river about 1.5 meters (five feet) from the top of the dike, and the village streets 10 meters (33 feet) below the dike top on the other side.
10 Mandatory evacuation started Thursday morning in the Tieler-en-Culemborgerwaard polder nearby, but many people still had not left.
11 'I just want to wait as long as possible,' said Manfred Schoelzel. 'I walk through downtown and it looked totally dead as if a nuclear bomb had fallen there.'
12 The exodus, the Netherlands' biggest ever, jammed highways with cars and trucks. It added to the wet misery in the southeastern Dutch lowlands, hard hit by the floods that have submerged parts of Europe, killing at least 29 people.
13 The evacuations have turned vast tracts of village and farmland in the below-sea level polder areas into ghostly landscapes devoid of people or any movement but the ripple of water.
14 At risk are not only the homes and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands, but also the centuries-long effort to turn the region's marsh and floodplain into what are known as polders by building more than 500 kilometers (300 miles) of dikes.
15 The network of dikes, one of the Netherlands' most prominent features, dates to the Middle Ages. And it is straining under the enormous pressure of the worst flooding in more than 40 years.
16 'The whole problem is that the dikes are soaked to the limit,' said Marij Delissen, a crisis management spokeswoman in Tiel. 'The pressure on the dikes just has to decline.'
17 Soldiers struggled to reinforce dikes weakened by the rampaging Maas and Waal rivers, which have been bearing the brunt of Western Europe's heavy rains and snow meltoff.
18 Barge traffic along the Waal, which connects the world's largest port, Rotterdam, with Germany via the Rhine, has been shut down to prevent damage to the dikes.
19 Wilhelmina Hoerst fled her mobile home in Ochten.
20 'If the dike breaks then it will be wrecked,' she said.
21 'We've taken all the expensive things like the television and video camera to friends and the dog to a kennel,' she said at an evacuation center in the city of Utrecht. Like many makeshift shelters, it was filling up fast.
22 The rising waters spread northward Wednesday, forcing Kampen, a town of 40,000, to build a second, emergency dike. Kampen lies along the Ijsel River, just south of the vast lake known as the Ijselmeer.
23 The Finance Ministry put the price tag for a 'worst-case scenario' of dikes bursting at up to dlrs 46 billion.
24 Some Dutch refused orders to leave their homes, despite threats of fines and jail terms.
25 Riot police were sent into the eastern section of the Waal city of Gorinchem to forcibly evacuate the remaining 4,000 residents.
26 'I'm absolutely not going to leave,' vowed Paul Gremmen, owner of a furniture factory in Wamel, another Waal town. 'If the water breaks through, I have to save the expensive computer-controlled machinery.'
27 Queen Beatrix, 57, splashed through puddles in her green rubber boots to chat with evacuees and comfort those about to leave their homes.
28 The Netherlands' second flood fatality was reported when a 62-year-old woman who fell into the Waal a day earlier died. She had been walking a dog along a dike in Winssen with her 52-year-old sister, who died Tuesday.
29 Dangerous, rushing water is no stranger to the Dutch. In 1953, a North Sea storm surge washed away 1,800 people in the southwestern coastal province of Zeeland.
30 Altogether, 29 people have been killed by the flooding in Europe this year, including 16 in France, four in Germany, five in Belgium, one in Luxembourg and one in Austria.
31 Flood waters throughout Germany were on the decline Wednesday, with the exception of the Kleve district, which is on alert should a dike break across the Dutch border.
32 Although flood waters were receding in France, the far-north Ardennes area remained badly flooded.

The front in the Dutch war against the flood has moved to this small town with soldiers and divers patching a deteriorating dike early Thursday after an all - night emergency operation .
patching a deteriorating dike
Why had the dike been deteriorating for so long?