It's been five days since the Merrimack Valley community was rocked by a series of gas explosions and fires. Many have been cleared to return home and resume their lives, but recovery is ongoing and filled with uncertainty.

At the entrance to Arlington Middle School in Lawrence, MA —which has become a crisis center — volunteers guide victims of the Columbia Gas explosions into a place of refuge, and donation-bearers drop off things like pillows, home-baked cakes, and water bottles.

64 year-old Samuel Hilario is among the disorderly throng. Normally, he works here as a teacher's aide, but on the Sunday after fires forced residents in the south side of the city to evacuate, he translates and directs shelter-seekers through the check-in process.

“It’s a lot going on,” he said, when asked about the mood inside, where media was barred. “I told some people if they don’t live here and they want to go to my house, they can shower, sleep. It’s a crisis. When it’s a crisis you gotta see people in their need.”

Hilario says this isn't the first time the school transformed to a crisis center overnight. He says he's lived in Lawrence for five decades, and whenever the city of roughly 70,000 has an emergency, people gather here. Even though the Merrimack Valley fires is the worst tragedy he's seen, the community's response has also been the strongest.

"I mean the whole city's united, helping — young people, old people, everybody — it's amazing what the people really have done here. I've never seen something like this. People, bringing water, food, bringing blankets, towels, donations, everything."

Officials can't say how many people have been helped here yet. Arlington Middle School is one of two spaces that have morphed into shelters for the displaced.

Chris Besse with Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) says they don't have an estimate of the number of people affected by last week's explosions and fires — all they have is an estimate from Columbia Gas that 8,600 meters were affected.

"But that's just a meter at someone's home, but we don't know in that home if there was one resident, if there were five residents, so we don't have a number of people,” he said.

Besse says even though evacuees can safely return to their homes, they'll now have to decide if they can live there.

"Once people get home, it's really going to be up to them to figure out, if they have electricity but maybe they don't have gas, are they going to stay in their home, or do they need to come to a shelter," he said.

About a mile away, outside the temporary property claims center set up by Columbia Gas, that's exactly what Raymond Roque is trying to decide.

"The first explosion was near my house, so we got evacuated right away,” he said in an interview with WGBH News.

Roque opted to leave shelter space free for someone who really needed it.

Instead, he, his wife, two children and mother-in-law packed into a room in a New Hampshire hotel after leaving their home with nothing.

“We've just been trying to hang in there," said Roque.

Roque and about 100 others were seeking reimbursement for their costs — hotel, food, clothing — but by the time they arrived Sunday afternoon, workers at the center stopped taking appointments.

Officials declined to explain the claims process, or tell WGBH News how many people they'd seen over the weekend. Workers and security officers stood outside issuing tickets with instructions to come back another day.

Roque says in the meantime, the hotel is expensive, and the whole experience has been rough.

"When you're not home, even if you're with your family members and stuff like that, you feel a little uncomfortable, like you wanna go home, because it's not home, of course."

He says he's also thinking hard about whether or not his family can go home without a working stove or hot water.

Emergency officials estimate it'll take weeks before gas service fully is restored.

That's if there's a home for people to return to.