HOUSTON—Thousands of Southeast Texas residents who fled from Hurricane Gustav were returning home Tuesday, some questioning the wisdom to leave because the once-mighty storm sprinkled only a little rain along the state’s eastern edges.

“Next time it’s going to be bad because people who evacuated like us aren’t going to evacuate,” Catherine Jones, 53, of Silsbee, said outside the Denman Avenue Baptist Church in Lufkin, where her Suburban, the last vehicle in the shelter’s parking lot, refused to start.

“They jumped the gun,” she said after spending three days at the church shelter with her disabled, 24-year-old son.

Andre Bobb, at a shelter in Austin, said next time, he won’t evacuate Port Arthur for anything less than a Category 4 hurricane.

“We just had a lot of rain, we didn’t barely get hit by the hurricane,” Bobb said.

But officials defended their evacuation orders for Jefferson, Orange and Hardin counties, which were in the predicted path of Gustav. The storm reached Category 4 intensity before weakening to a Category 2 with 110-mph winds—as it made landfall Monday morning some 200 miles east of the Texas line.

“It was the only call,” Hardin County Judge Billy Caraway, the county’s chief administrator, said of the evacuation order that began Sunday, prompting about half of the 58,000 county residents to leave. “It’s tough on people but it’s almost a necessary evil we have to go through.”

The order for the three counties about 100 miles east of Houston was lifted at 6 a.m. Tuesday.

“If you’re in this situation, you can’t do this thing at the last minute,” Caraway said. “So if you err, you err on the side of safety.”

“We’re in an area that’s very unpredictable,” James Tomplait, 66, said Tuesday, his return home from Lufkin to Port Neches delayed by car trouble.

But asked if he agreed with the evacuation that sent him to Carpenter’s Way Baptist Church in Lufkin, Tomplait was emphatic.

“Definitely,” he said.

Gustav, downgraded to a tropical depression, sloshed into northwest Louisiana with forecasts calling for as much as a foot of rain by Wednesday for areas that included far northeast Texas. Maximum sustained winds were near 35 mph with some higher gusts but the storm was continuing to weaken as it moved north into Arkansas and Oklahoma.

“You just do what you have to do,” Jill Frillou, spokeswoman for Orange County, said. “You prepare for the worst and we’re glad it missed. It’s better to be too early than too late.

“Our main concern was the safety of citizens. We’re just lucky we weren’t hit.”

Frillou said officials in the Texas-Louisiana border county heard complaints three years ago from residents who were stuck in a stalled evacuation as Hurricane Rita bore down on Beaumont, Port Arthur and Orange.

“We tried to coordinate as a region to run as smoothly as possible,” she said of the lessons learned from Rita. “You deal with the situations as they occur.

Katherine Cesinger, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry, said local officials make the decision with the information they have at the time.

“There’s a window with which to act” as the storm gets close, she said. “We obviously can’t negotiate with Mother Nature on where this thing goes.”

The “first fleet” of nearly 150 buses were headed Tuesday from San Antonio to Lufkin and Longview to return as many as 10,000 people who couldn’t get back on their own, Cesinger said.

Some who were ill or had special medical conditions who need to be flown out will get that help “in a day or two,” she said.

Cesinger said Texas officials were working with their counterparts in Louisiana to safely return Louisianans who sheltered in Texas, like the nearly 200 who spent their second day Tuesday at a recreation center in Irving, a Dallas suburb.

A group of four sitting at a picnic table in a nearby park hadn’t heard the fate of their homes in Houma, just 30 miles north of Cocodrie, where Gustav made landfall.

“It gets a little more difficult as the days go on. People get a little antsy,” said Kathy Catania, a Red Cross worker brought in from San Diego to serve as a shelter manager. “These people that don’t have transportation, they have to stay. So it could be more frustrating for them wanting to get home and not being able to because they have to wait for someone else to make that decision for them.”

The first of about 1,500 people weren’t likely to be moved out of Texarkana until at least Wednesday because wind gusts exceeded 35 mph, topping the federal limit for buses returning evacuees home, Dave Hall, the emergency management coordinator in Texarkana, Ark., said.

At a rural church in Texarkana, Bernice Mitchell, a 27-year-old nursing home cook who evacuated Port Arthur with her husband and two toddlers, tried convincing herself she was on vacation.

“I was frustrated,” Mitchell said of the prospect of being stranded there until Friday. “But then I thought about how we’re blessed to have a roof over our head and food.”

Curtis Bobb, 25, drove to Austin with his brother Andre from Port Arthur, said he’s ready to leave the Gulf Coast.

“We might have stayed and it hit hard and be floating somewhere now,” said who does contract work for oil refineries in the Gulf. “When I get back I plan on saving up and I’ll probably come back out here. I like it out here.”