Looking Back, with Eric Leaver

AS a heat-wave August gives way to September, no doubt many in East Lancashire are hoping for an extended Indian Summer.

But it wasn't so 38 years ago - people here were praying for it to pour down.

For as the 1959 summer went on and on, clocking up sunshine totals just short of the 1911 record, the arrival of September also saw East Lancashire record its driest summer since 1901 - and suffer desperate drought restrictions that make the hose-pipe bans of the 1990s seem like pinpricks.

For as the rain resolutely refused to pour and some reservoirs ran bone dry, the measures that the old water boards in East Lancashire resorted to included a ban on taking baths and using washing machines, water cut-offs to firms and thousands of homes, closing off the canal, calling in the Boy Scouts and providing luminous taps.

It was all over by the end of October when, at last, the longed-for deluge arrived. But for two months the region teetered on the brink of disaster as water supplies in some towns were just days from running out completely.

First to feel the pinch were the Rossendale Valley communities supplied by the Irwell Valley Water Board whose ten reservoirs, capable of holding 136 days' supply, were down to just a fortnight's at the start of September due to an exceptionally dry winter and spring and then the super summer. Notices went up banning all but the sick from taking baths. The use of washing machines was outlawed. Householders were told to use washing-up water to flush their toilets. And workmen tightened 30,000 stop taps leading from the mains so that the supply to houses was reduced.

And it was only fear of disease epidemics and even hospital closures that deterred the water board from turning off domestic taps completely and making householders draw supplies from standpipes in the street. For the board's engineer warned that the introduction of emergency standpipes would mean 30,000 homes would have to be provided with chemical toilets as the public sewage system broke down. And even if the health authorities could supply them, they could not cope with emptying them.

Yet though the extent of the crisis varied across the region - Blackburn, for instance, had 35 days' water left and Nelson had 37, compared with the Irwell Valley's fourteen - it had prompted panic searches for new sources.

Burnley Council ordered a survey of the Thursden Valley in a search for underground supplies and sought an order from the government to draw 21,000 gallons an hour from the River Don. At Blackburn, as loudspeaker vans toured the streets urging economy and the town's Daisy Green reservoir, normally 31 ft deep, became a dust bowl and the rubble of the old Stocks-in-Bowland village emerged in the depleted reserves of the giant reservoir, the town began buying 2.5million gallons a day from the Fylde Water Board.

Bacup, too, began surveys for underground supplies. The town's fire brigade began round-the-clock pumping at an underground spring at Whittaker Clough to add 120 gallons a minute to the town's water supply as it plunged to 17 days.

At Helmshore, plans were made to supply homes from the borehole at the village's Albion Mill. Accrington, already months into supplementing its stocks with water from the Lake District, drawn from Manchester's Haweswater aqueduct, began taking another 230,000 gallons a day from the pipeline.

Haslingden's Borough Surveyor began studying old maps for the location of forgotten wells - and one in the cellar of the municipal offices was tapped to provide a precious 1,000 gallons extra a days.

Burnley fire brigade began to fill its appliances with water from the canal and, as supplies to the Rawtenstall mill of textile manufacturers Smith and Nephew were cut to a trickle, the firm began to ship in drinking water from outside the district in milk churns.

Soon, in response to the Irwell Valley board's suspension of supplies to factories in order to conserve supplies, now at their lowest for 60 years, firms in Rossendale were shipping in water by tanker and 300 workers in Haslingden's Sykeside Mill owed their jobs to pumps which piped waste water from the mill's engine back to the firm's lodge several hundred yards away. The lake in Corporation Park, Blackburn, was tapped by East Lancashire Cricket Club to flood the sun-baked pitch at Alexandra Meadows and stretches of the Leeds-Liverpool canal were closed so that supplies were conserved for firms drawing water from it. And in no-baths Haslingden, the slipper baths at the swimming pool were shut.

All holidays at Nelson's Water Department were cancelled as employees worked flat out to deal with dripping taps and leakages in order to preserve supplies.

At Tockholes, the Royal Arms pub and neighbouring houses, dependent on nearby springs, were rescued by water sent in beer barrels from Thwaites brewery in Blackburn when one of the springs ran dry and the other became insufficient.

And, householders living in the Royal Oak Cottages at Barrowford - just a few strides from the Ridge O' Ling reservoir - were without water for a week when the spring that supplied them also dried up and forced the council to deliver water to them in dustbins. "I have lived in these cottages for 45 years and this is the hottest summer and worst water shortage I can remember," said resident Jack Emmett .

Others were angry. "You have a fortnight's fine weather and notices go up to save water," said Coun H Sanderson at Haslingden Town Council's meeting, complaining that it was 1905 since the Irwell Valley Water Board had built a new reservoir.

But what was needed was rain.

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