Two days after the dramatic snowstorm that hit Catalunya, some 66,000 houses and businesses in the Girona region are still without electricity and some roads are still experiencing traffic jams (read article in Castilian here, La Vangaurdia). The electricity company Endesa said that 70 percent of those affected by the cut in electricity on Monday had had power restored to them yesterday, but that 66,000 homes and businesses were still without electricity; Endesa hopes that all those affected will see power return at some point today—while it has fixed the fault in the network, the company is having problems in reconnecting all the different systems. The towns affected include Lloret de Mar, Sant Feliu de Guíxols and Torroella de Montgrí, as well as some residents in the city of Girona itself. Meanwhile, some roads are still causing problems for vehicles, particularly the AP-7 at the border between Catalunya and France, where lorries that had to halt their journey because of their snow are now trying to continue on into France, causing serious tail-backs. This morning the other road that crosses into France at La Jonquera, the N-II, had to be closed due to fresh snowfall. Elsewhere, 78 sections of road in Catalunya are affected by snow or ice, of which 19 are completely closed.

Despite the chaos caused in many parts of Catalunya due to Monday’s snow, the Generalitat’s Minister of the Interior, Joan Saura, has defended the government’s handling of the situation and says that the weather forecast should have been better (read article in Castilian here, La Vanguardia). Saura argued that it was the loss of electricity that had caused the biggest problems in the region and that, without that, within 24 hours of the unusual snowfall, the country would have been back to normal. He also defended the actions of the coalition government against criticism from the opposition Convergencia i Unió (CiU) party and said that the actions taken by the authorities this time had been far superior to those taken by CiU back in 2001, when Catalunya also faced heavy snow.

Also in the news: Caixa Girona withdraws from fusion plan at last minute (read full article in Catalan here, Avui); Unused land in Ciutat Vella to temporarily be given over to social projects (read full article in Castilian here, El Periodico); Catalunya-based British author Tom Sharpe compares conditions following snowstorm to England in World War Two—read his letter to La Vanguardia here, in Castilian