Nationwide power cuts averaged 31 per cent yesterday, with 40 per cent in some areas, and hospitals faced their most critical 24 hours of the strike so far with staff struggling to keep going by candle and battery power.
Limited supplies from standby generators kept premature babies alive and stocks of blood usable, and allowed some essential operations to continue.
Sir Keith Joseph, Secretary for Social Services, instructed hospitals to contact patients using heart, lung and kidney machines and to call them in if necessary. In a statement he said that where it was necessary to ensure continuity of treatment, patients would be taken into suitable hospitals. If there was any doubt about what should be done in an emergency, advice should be sought at once from a patients╒ treatment centre where a 24-hour service was in operation.
As the Electricity Council again appealed to people to reduce demand, a joint statement by Mr Peter Walker, Minister for the Environment, and Mr Peter Thomas, Secretary for Wales, called on all local authorities to reduce all heating and lighting to the minimum compatible with health.
They also asked the authorities to encourage ╥good neighbour╙ schemes to enlist volunteers to help people affected by the power cuts.
Sir John Eden, Minister for Industry, said at a lunch in London yesterday that nothing could justify the widespread disruption caused by the work-to-rule and added that he could not believe that the men intended to endanger human life.
He warned that organised industrial unrest on the scale now being witnessed had grave consequences for the economy as a whole and as such it would be firmly resisted.
╥For the Government to acquiesce in the financing of further inflationary settlements would be a betrayal of their responsibility to the broad mass of the British people, to their security and their standards of life.╙
More than 90 army generators were in use at hospitals throughout the country last night and in Kent an ice cream firm at Deal supplied four vans fitted with generators to hospitals in Canterbury, Margate and Herne Common.
The most anxious staff were those in children╒s hospitals. At the Great Ormond Street hospital, with 350 patients ranging from premature babies to seriously ill 11-year-olds, stocks of emergency respirators were brought into the wards.
╥We have hand-pump breathing apparatus ready for immediate use,╙ a hospital official said. ╥Our emergency generators can give us limited power for essential areas, but if they go we have to use the pumps.╙
The Queen Elizabeth Children╒s Hospital in Hackney Road, east London, had a two-hour blackout yesterday and premature babies in a special intensive care ward were kept alive on power from a standby generator.
The hospital secretary, Mr Ernest Westlake, said: ╥We only had enough power for the incubators and for the refrigerator at our bloodbank. We had to stop operations and we could not use the lifts to take up feeds for the babies.╙
The hospital has one of the country╒s most important pathological laboratories for the investigation of child diseases ╤ and this was out of action yesterday. Some investigatory processes were ruined when delicate machines ceased to function.
At the hospital╒s country branch at Banstead, Surrey, vital treatment for children suffering from fibrocystic disease of the pancreas was interrupted by a three-hour failure. The children need twice-daily sessions on electricity driven vaporising breathing apparatus.
Five operations were cancelled at the Italian Hospital in London when it was hit together with the Great Ormond Street and Homeopathic Hospital nearby ╤ by a sudden blackout. ╥We have no standby generators╙, the hospital╒s secretary said. ╥Fortunately the day was light enough for us to carry on, but we had to cancel a lot of operations.╙
Many people suffering from cancer were unable to have deep radiation treatment. The linear accelerator at Addenbrookes╒ Hospital, Cambridge, was one of many out of action in the country.
The power strike also threatens to hit many thousands of paypackets. A survey by the National Computer Centre yesterday revealed that 70 per cent of the nation╒s biggest computers have already suffered stoppages through the reductions and blackouts.
