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The summer is pretty much over in the Balearics, met office sources said yesterday that, while this current batch of unsettled weather and storms will hang around until Friday, there are no signs that the weather in September will compensate for such an awful and unseasonal August. It has been the wettest August for the past 50 years in the Balearics and more rain is forecast to fall over the next few days with the region remaining on storm alert. This latest “cold snap“ claimed the life of a local fisherman whose body was found off the coast of Camp de Mar beach on Sunday. The “cold snap” has astonished holidaymakers and confounded meteorologists. The Centre for Mediterranean Environment Studies in Valencia said yesterday that the current weather pattern which is threatening the Balearics, Cataluña and Cantabria, posesses all of the characteristics of the infamous “gota fria,” but that is a winter weather front, more common in January - not the height of the summer. Today the Balearics can brace itself for a return of the storms and torrential rain, last night the emergency services in Palma were on full alert as a similar downpour to Saturday's, which brought the city to a halt, was forecast, just as it is today. Some improvement in the weather is expected tomorrow, along with a slight increase in temperature, but the last drops of rain, which at times will turn to hail, will not be seen until Friday. The emergency services yesterday said that some of the reasons for Palma literally filling up like a bucket and being brought to a chaotic halt in just one hour, are the poor condition of the city's streets, the amount of rubbish on the streets, the poor maintenance of the sewers and the capital's frail infrastructure. The City council hit back, standing by the municipal water board EMAYA, praising it for keeping the city and the sewers clean. A council spokesperson said that there was little that could have been done on Saturday considering the force of the rain. However, scores of city folk whose homes or shops were flooded, again, have complained. “Granted Saturday was unusual, but every time it rains we get flooded and Palma's brought to a standstill,” one angry home owner said yesterday.