Weather causes havoc in Balearics

HIGH winds caused extensive damage in the port of Andraitx, where a wall collapsed, damaging cars, although nobody was injured.
Elsewhere on the island, hundreds of people drove up to the mountains to get a closer look at the snow, children taking great delight in making snowballs. In the port of Andraitx, the high winds caused part of a wall on a building site to collapse, causing damage to two cars which were parked next to it.
The site is in Calle Isaac Peral, and the wall came down at around 4am, causing considerable alarm among neighbours because of the noise.
The police were called and the fire brigade from Santa Ponsa came to remove the rubble which was blocking the road, so that traffic could not pass.
The police contacted the owners of the two cars, which sustained considerable damage.
The wall was about 40 metres long and had been built to cut off the building site.
Neighbours said that it was “lucky” that the accident had occurred in the middle of the night, as the street is a busy one and is close to a school.
The road had been cleared by early morning.
The port of Ciudadela in Minorca was closed to traffic in the early hours of yesterday morning, when winds in the Minorcan channel were blowing at more than 60kph. This forced the ferry companies to cancel their services to Alcudia and Cala Rajada.
The Minorcan fishing fleet was also forced to stay in port.
The tiny island of Formentera was isolated when its port was closed because of heavy seas and its ferry link to Ibiza was cancelled.
For today, the Met office predicts cloudy intervals with occasional showers, the risk of storms, and snow at 500 metres, but the high winds will drop and Civil Defence is no longer on the alert in the Balearics. Nine regions in the north of Spain, however, are still on alert because of heavy snow and high winds.