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By ROBERT MILLS and MICHAEL LAFLEUR
Lowell Sun
LOWELL, Mass — Nearly an inch and a half of rain has fallen during each of the last seven days.
The river that runs through the city is flooding, and will not crest for another six hours.
Residents are being asked to evacuate.
Basement flooding is expected at least to the first floor.
Command officers from the Lowell police and fire departments, foremen from the Department of Public Works and others meet to plan a response to the pending disaster.
But this is not the city’s Emergency Operations Center, and this did not happen last weekend.
The scenario described above took place at Cross Point Towers, repeatedly, during the last few months. It was training.
In a stroke of good planning and even better timing, dozens of the command officers within the Fire Department, Police Department, DPW, and Wastewater Utility participated in the “Emerald City Flood,” a training scenario funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and overseen by Lowell Fire Chief William Desrosiers and Mark Boldrighini, Lowell’s deputy director of emergency management.
Deputy Lowell Police Superintendent Kenneth Lavallee was one of them. He was joined by emergency personnel from across the Merrimack Valley.
“We discussed all that would happen in a situation like this and, sure enough, it happened a month later,” he said.
In Lowell, City Manager John Cox, in consultation with Desrosiers and Lowell Police Superintendent Edward Davis opened the city’s emergency operations center on Sunday afternoon as weather forecasts grew more grim.
By 8 or 9 p.m. on Sunday, the city’s emergency plan was fully activated, Davis said.
During Tuesday’s meeting of the City Council’s public safety subcommittee, he estimated that he expects storm-related overtime costs to top $50,000 for the Police Department alone.
A Lowell Fire Department overtime estimate was unavailable as were estimates for other city departments.
The flooding has been stretching resources at the evacuation shelter set up at the Lowell Senior Center by the Merrimack Valley chapter of the American Red Cross.
Senior Center director Lynne Brown-Zounes said she has been acting at times as the shelter director.
City Health Director Frank Singleton said he has had to draw upon the city’s public-health nurses and school nurses, as well as volunteers from the region’s Medical Reserve Corps.
Singleton said the hard part comes now. Officials must find more-permanent housing for the approximately 20 remaining evacuees, some of whom are renters who cannot return to their apartments for weeks or months. Others are homeless and have been washed out of encampments along the Merrimack or Concord rivers, he said.
Yvonne Zinicola, executive director of the Merrimack Valley Red Cross, said the organization is staffing shelters in Lowell, Methuen — where there are now about 115 evacuees — and Salem, N.H. She added that the Red Cross must pair with local officials to provide resources.
Zinicola counseled patience and said FEMA officials are expected to assess the city today.
“This is the largest disaster we’ve seen in the Merrimack Valley with respect to flooding in quite some time, so obviously resources are stretched thin at every possible front,” she said. “The important thing is it that people are reassured there’s going to be a game plan getting together.”