More rainshowers threatened to hamper cleanup efforts today in southwest England's flood-ravaged village of Boscastle as residents waited to return to their sodden homes.
The Meterological Office issued a "severe" weather warning for the area and said more local flooding was likely.
But a spokesman said floodwaters would be "nowhere near" the scale of Monday when torrents of rainwater surged through the north Cornwall village, sweeping cars out to sea and forcing people to take refuge in trees and on rooftops.
Several people remained "unaccounted for", but authorities said they did not believe anyone had died and those considered missing may simply have been tourists who were safe but whose relatives had not managed to contact them.
However, they did not rule out the possibilty of finding bodies trapped in cars still submerged underwater. Two police sniffer dogs were brought in to help in the search for bodies.
A spokeswoman for Cornwall County Fire Brigade said a team of building engineers was checking every home in the village of about 800 people to ensure each was structurally sound before allowing residents to return.
Owners of the least damaged buildings were expected to begin returning home this afternoon.
Rescuers airlifted about 150 people to safety from the inundated village, including a 16-month-old baby enclosed in a rucksack, resulting in one of the country's biggest emergency operations in years.
It was still unclear how much financial damage had been caused to the picturesque village, a large amount of which is owned by the National Trust conservation body.