SOUTH Africa has lost six huge, bright orange fuel storage tanks, adrift on an iceberg “somewhere in the southern oceans,” Finance Minister Trevor Manuel told parliament this week. “The tanks, admittedly, were hard to lose,” he said. “Normally they sit on a huge ice-shelf, about 300m high, that projects from the edge of Antarctica into the Atlantic Ocean. Last summer the unforeseeable, if not the unthinkable happened. The edge, all 17km of it, broke off and floated off with our tanks.” A South African ship, along with Russian and German vessels, tried unsuccessfully to reach the empty tanks. The loss cost the country R1.2m. – AFP