Detroit Steel pulled a radio from a yard locomotive and lent it to the city for communication between the $100,000,000 plant and the fire department.  An emergency at a blast furnace could involve hundred of its 4,200 employees.

The city's 2 radio stations, WNXT and WPAY, went on a 24-hour schedule to broadcast emergency calls.  Funeral homes moved ambulances to the police station, where their drivers waited to rush to an accident scene, and a Ford dealer stationed a wrecker there.  City firemen joined police in burglar patrol.  The General Hospital kept technicians on 24-hour-a-day duty.

In police headquarters, additional radio transmitters were stacked on desk tops and placed on the floor.  They were tuned to highway patrol headquarters a mile north; to the Norfolk and Western Railway years; to the operator at the Yellow Cab office.  Assistant Chief, Albert Bailey, an amateur radio hobbyist, brought in a transmitter that was used to send death notices to next of kin in Kentucky and West Virginia.

The Portsmouth Motocycle Club and the Kustom Kouriers Kar Club, formerly the Hot Rod Club, volunteered to rush messages.

A supervisor's car was set on fire in a riot on October 11, 1956, just before the long telephone blackout.

Mrs. William Kempton which her baby, who had to be delivered by a substitute doctor during the strike; her own could not be reached at the time.

Shortly after dawn on the 10th day of the blackout, Mrs. Samuel W. Lawrence, a 26-year-old mother of three preschool daughters, felt the strong contractions that told her that her fourth child was arriving.  Her husband was in Columbus, 90 miles away.  She had no car, no telephone.  She awoke a neighbot to care for her sleeping children and went out into the street hoping to hail a taxi to take her to the hospital.  But although cabs were cruising Portsmouth with the zeal of volunteers, now there was none for Mrs. Lawrence.  In desperation she flagged a car.  The two young men in it had been on an all-night drinking party.  They frightened her. 

One man got out of the car, urged her to enter and took her by the arm.  She shrugged him off, but he persisted.  Then Miss Irene Weisenberger, driving to work, saw the stuggling woman and stopped.  The man released Mrs. Lawrence and she was driven to the General Hospital.  A fourth daughter was born that morning.