1 Flood refugees are lashing out at the government and environmentalists, claiming red tape and natural beauty were put before their own safety.
2 'These dikes have been here since the 13th century and they just haven't been kept up because of . the environmental freaks,' said Leen van der Berg.
3 He's from Tiel, a city bearing the brunt of the flooding that has forced some 250,000 people to abandon their homes in southeastern Netherlands.
4 'You need to have an eye for the landscape, but it's more important to look out for the people,' he said.
5 Van der Berg and other critics blame environmentalists for lobbying against dike reinforcement plans. But the environmentalists say bureaucratic red tape is to blame.
6 'The most important thing is to keep the beauty in the region and also to keep the security,' said Roelof van Loenen, spokesman for the Gelderland Province Environment Defense Foundation.
7 His group has spoken out against recent proposed plans to reinforce the dikes with concrete blocks. 'That would ruin the beauty of the region' and its rich plant life, Van Loenen said.
8 But dike worker Theo van Maurik accuses the environmental lobby of holding up efforts to shore up the dikes, many of which date to the Middle Ages.
9 'They've been trying to reinforce the dikes for 10 years,' he said. 'But the environmentalists want to keep this area as environmental as possible.'
10 About 540 kilometers (330 miles) of dikes in the flooded Gelderland region of below-sea-level polder land need reinforcement, according to the Ministry of Transport and Waterways.
11 With the flood his first crisis since taking office in August, Prime Minister Wim Kok pleaded Tuesday in Parliament for measures to speed up the lengthy process of approving dike construction.
12 But there's still plenty of debate on how to do it.
13 'The plans are there,' said Ellen Timmers, a spokeswoman for Ministry of Transport and Waterways. 'But there are all kinds of procedures. It can take years before they can really start doing the work.'
14 Those procedures include filing an extensive and time-consuming report listing all the environmental effects of any construction, applying for licenses, and getting permission from local and provincial authorities.
15 Environmentalists refuse to back down from plans that don't meet their demands for the dikes.
16 'Since the war, nobody has done anything about them,' said Frans Vinken, 66, who was born on a farm just off the Tiel dike. 'And the environment group has been stopping everything. We just need a stronger dike now.'
17 The Ministry of Transport and Waterways say dikes aren't their problem and it's up to provincial authorities to deal with them.
18 'Local authorities are responsible for the dikes. They can best see what the problems are,' said ministry spokesman Hans Scholten.
19 'True, it's all taking a long time,' said Marco van der Schaft, Tiel's environmental adviser. 'Let's not discuss who's guilty because that will not save our dikes now.'

Flood refugees are lashing out at the government and environmentalists , claiming red tape and natural beauty were put before their own safety .
Flood refugees
Where are the refugees from?