Aid for residents displaced by flooding

Approximately 100 people who were displaced by a water main break continued to receive services at the city’s senior center on Tuesday as the city worked to find them more appropriate housing, officials said. The split in the pipe has been repaired, and workers were in the process of repaving damaged streets and repairing flooded properties, but there is “a lot of work ahead of us for the city, as well as for the residents themselves,” Mayor Sokhary Chau said. “The focus right now is to move them to hotels, and I believe there’s about 27 hotel rooms that have been secured,” Chau said in an interview Tuesday evening. “There are not that many hotels in the area that have available rooms, so I hope in the next two or three days that they … will secure enough hotel rooms to place everybody there.” On Monday, officials responded at about 3:30 p.m. to a report of a water main break near Father Morrisette Boulevard and Suffolk Street. Close to 200 residents of City View Towers, a subsidized development on Merrimack Street operated by the Lowell Housing Authority, were evacuated. “The basement got flooded, and it affected the electricity, so it’s unsafe for them to be in the residence,” Chau said. About half of the displaced residents went to stay with family or friends, while the rest spent Monday night at the senior center where officials set up a shelter with assistance from the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, and other agencies, Chau said.