Dutch Order Mass Evacuation in Flood Region : Europe: Residents by tens of thousands flee the eastern Netherlands. Waters begin to recede in parts of four other countries.

Emergency crews in five nations Tuesday fought to control some of northern Europe’s worst flooding this century as the Dutch government, worried that the country’s system of dikes might collapse, launched a mass evacuation of population centers.

“The Netherlands tonight faces a total emergency,” began the main Dutch national television news Tuesday evening. The pictures that followed showed worried and bewildered residents throughout much of the eastern part of the country leaving their homes and boarding police, army or military buses to be driven to safety.

Authorities asked the public to stay off the country’s main east-west highway so it can be used as an evacuation route.

“About 100,000 are in the process of being evacuated today, and another 150,000 have been told to prepare to go,” said Peter van Raaij, a spokesman at a regional crisis center established in this transportation hub on the Meuse River a few miles west of the German frontier.

The evacuation is concentrated in the lowlands of the eastern Netherlands, where the Rhine, Meuse and Waal rivers threaten to burst through weakened dikes and engulf several large towns.

Exhausted Dutch emergency crews and worried civil authorities, who have labored to contain the slowly rising floodwaters for nearly a week, are bracing for today’s expected peak levels--which are anticipated to be several inches above previous records.

“Tomorrow is the peak, but it could stay there for two or three days, and the dikes are getting weaker every minute,” Van Raaij said. “Water is seeping through and effectively undermining them.”

While the Netherlands prepared for the worst, floodwaters gradually began to recede Tuesday in parts of western Germany, France, Belgium and Luxembourg, all seriously hit by the disaster. But some danger areas remained in those nations too.

In the medieval Belgian city of Bruges, crisscrossed by canals, authorities closed a large lock in hopes of fending off new flooding caused by heavy rains, stiff north winds and a North Sea tide. The German city of Klewe, sandwiched between the Meuse and Rhine, could also face new flooding if dikes to the southwest of the city fail.

Britain also has experienced its wettest January since 1948 and issued some flood alerts, but actual flooding has so far been minor.

Authorities believe that in the five continental countries the disaster has so far claimed more than 20 lives, left thousands homeless and caused property damage that is likely to run into the billions of dollars.

But the real legacy of the flooding could be in the deeply unsettling, longer-term message it seems to be delivering to the millions who live along northern Europe’s major waterways. With the region’s second “flood of the century” in just 13 months, there are those who now believe it is as much the result of overbuilding and over-cultivating as of excessive snow and rain.

Cultivated land, roads and buildings do not absorb rain as efficiently as nature would, experts say. In some cases, projects to reroute rivers to handle barge traffic more efficiently have enlarged and accelerated the excess overflow. The effect is roughly similar to that of opening a tap all the way.

“This high water is partially man-made,” claimed Klaudia Martini, environment minister for the German state of Rhineland Palatinate, scene of some of the worst flooding in recent days. “We’ve been raping nature for 40 years, and we’ve got to change that.”

Speaking in The Hague, Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok called for an immediate review of the country’s legendary system of dikes, expanded over the past 60 years to protect the low-lying land from ocean flooding.

“We are now finding that the rivers are more threatening than the sea,” he said.

There is also talk of greater regional cooperation to better control future flooding. “Dikes are not enough on their own,” claimed Jean-Pierre Grafe, a minister in Belgium’s Walloon regional government. “Unless we can work in closer collaboration with France and the Netherlands, then we are going to continue damaging the entire environment.”

The Belgian government was forced to evacuate some residents in the Meuse Valley near the town of Dinant.

In much of Germany on Tuesday, tensions dropped as water levels on the Rhine and Main rivers began to recede below crisis levels. In Bonn, flooded streets remained lined with a network of hastily built footbridges and sandbag walls as soldiers ferried residents to and from their homes in rubber rafts.

To lighten the mood, some residents erected signs on the temporary footbridges: “5 deutsch marks to cross the bridge, 10 deutsch marks with wet feet, double price for diplomats.”

Karin Blume, whose house in the city’s suburban Mehlem district is now an island, said she has drinking water, electricity and heat but no telephone, so when she wants soldiers to pick her up she hangs a sign on her balcony that reads “Please collect passenger.”

In France, conditions also eased Tuesday, although more than 250,000 residents remained without drinking water as the government officially declared the flood a national disaster.

In the Netherlands, no official declaration was necessary. The drained, empty faces of a group of 50 evacuees facing their fifth night in a small community center here carried their own message of suffering. While several thousand were due to spend the next few days in such centers, the majority of those evacuated appear to have been taken in by friends and relatives.

Also contributing to this report were Times staff writers Marjorie Miller in Bonn and William Tuohy in London, and researchers Sarah White in Paris, Isabelle Maelcamp in Brussels and Christopher Steinmets in Berlin.