All council services are running as normal following last Friday's heavy snowfall and a weekend of hard work by council officers as they cleared roads of snow ready for the new working week.

Thanks in part to the gritting crews, the council has managed to open all its schools today – an incredible achievement considering the volume of snow that fell Friday and the continuing disruption that this has caused throughout the UK.

The authority is fully prepared for the further snowfalls predicted for tonight and tomorrow morning and is confident about its supplies of grit. Monmouthshire began the winter with a stock of 10,000 tonnes of road salt. It used to start with 7,500 tonnes and never ran out. As of last Thursday night it had a stock of just over 8,000 tonnes of road salt.

"Since then we have continued to grit over 300 miles of road on scheduled gritting routes. In addition, we have gritted much of our minor road network, pavements in town centres, car parks and approaches to schools," said a spokesman.

"Where requested by the schools, we have gritted school yards. In total, we used about 800 tonnes of road salt. We have a pre-arranged delivery of salt due later today. This will bring stocks up to 7900 tonnes. We remain confident that we will have sufficient salt stocks to see us through the winter.

"Social Media has played a key role in ensuring Monmouthshire's residents are kept up to date with the impact that the current severe weather conditions are having on services.

"We use a range of tools to keep the communities we serve fully updated about council services. During difficult weather conditions, like the ones were experiencing, digital communication tools become particularly important.

"Our web site has seen a huge increase in traffic as it's here that we post the latest news on service availability. But Twitter has proved itself to be a very useful way of engaging with communities.

"As one of the first UK local authorities to embrace social media, Monmouthshire has a longstanding Twitter account. With over 7000 followers (people who sign up to receive our Twitter updates, known as tweets) we are well placed to get updates out to a large proportion of our population.

"Since the snow hit we've had 101 of our tweets retweeted (when one of our tweets is forwarded by one of our followers to all their followers), we've been retweeted 330 times and gained 337 followers. In just three hours on Sunday 201th January, we've reached 9,700 accounts and made 49936 impressions: http://tweetreach.com/reach?q=monmouthshirecc.&quot">http://tweetreach.com/reach?q=monmouthshirecc."

Cllr Peter Fox, the leader of Monmouthshire County Council, said: "We're so grateful to those people who have retweeted and shared information around the county - community spirit is alive online as well as our on the snowy roads."