Goiânia, September 13th, 1987. Waste pickers Wagner and Roberto search throgh stuff in an abandoned downtown clinic in search of any valuable item. At the site, they find an abandoned machine made of steel and lead.
Certain that they’d hit the jackpot, they carry the device to Roberto's house and begin to dismantle it in order to sell the pieces separately. Little did they know of the nightmare to come. This is how one of the greatest tragedies involving radiation in our country's history began: the Radiologic Accident in Goiânia.
Hi, my dear friends, you all right? I'm Felipe Castanhari and today I'm going to tell a story that seems to have come straight out of a horror movie. I'm talking about the terrible story of Cesium-137, which took place here in Brazil, in the 80's.
This is one of the biggest nuclear disasters that've happened outside a nuclear power plant. Just so you know, on the International Scale of Nuclear Accidents, which goes from zero to seven, the case of Cesium-137 is considered a level five, that means it’s an accident with far-reaching consequences. This accident left the whole country aware since it happened a year and a half after the tragic Chernobyl disaster, which I've already told it’s story and I'll leave the link here in the description.
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The names of these wonderful members are here, thank you so much beautiful and wonderful people! Thanks to everyone for their support and now we are going to tell the story of the worst nuclear accident that has ever happened in the history of Brazil. The before mentioned building had been used by the Radiotherapy Institute of Goiania, which specializes in cancer treatments.
The clinic had been shut down two years earlier, in 1985, but a radiotherapy device - a treatment that uses ionizing radiation, so it has enough energy to change the structure of atoms, tearing off one or more of its electrons - ended up being left behind. They just forgot it there, as if it were an old projector. And it was precisely this device that the waste pickers dismantled in Roberto's house.
Two days after starting doing that, the two were already suffering from nausea, dizziness and diarrhea. They had no idea that the radiotherapy device was largely responsible for causing all these symptoms, so they continued to poke around in it. After five days in contact with the device, they sold what was left of it all to Devair, the owner of a junkyard in the city.
He immediately sent two of his employees, Israel and Admilson, to finish the machine in search of valuable parts. Inside the device, they found a capsule with 93 grams of a white powder, similar to ordinary table salt, that glowed bluish in the dark. Enchanted by the object's brightness, Devair made the worst imaginable decision: he took the substance home, in order to show it to his wife, Maria Gabriela.
And the story only gets worse: soon neighbors and friends started visiting just to see the shiny capsule from close. One of these people was Devair's brother Ivo, who took some of the dust and took it home. During dinner he introduced the peculiar object to his family.
His six-year-old daughter Leide even ended up ingesting some of the substance without noticing, as her hands were contaminated with radioactive material. Within a few days, all these people began to show the same symptoms as the waste pickers, such as dizziness, vomiting and feeling weak. Two weeks later, Maria Gabriela, Devair's wife, became suspicious that the substance had something to do with these problems and took the capsule to Health Surveillance.
There it was discovered that the capsule contained a radioactive isotope of Cesium, called Cesium-137, which is a by-product of the fission of uranium or plutonium. The nuclei of Cesium-137 are highly unstable and emit a form of radiation known as beta particles, which can penetrate the human body, causing very serious damage. But wait on, it's not over yet.
Because in this process of emitting beta particles, the nucleus of Cesium-137 turns into another radioactive element called Barium-137. This element emits gamma rays, which are even more harmful because they pass through a person's body completely, causing irreparable damage. The scientists' first analyzes showed that both the junkyard and the area of Devair's house had extremely high levels of radiation.
But as Devair had given samples of the cesium to other people, this radiation spread throughout the city and seven areas of Goiânia had to be evacuated. To worsen it all, the government hid the cause of the accident. More than 112,000 people were taken into the Olympic Stadium, where they were screened, without even receiving an exact explanation of what was happening.
This monitoring showed that 129 residents of Goiânia were seriously contaminated. To understand a little better what happened to these people, we need to talk about a unit that measures the amount of radiation absorbed by the body, called 'gray'. When you take an x-ray, you're exposed to a thousandth of a gray, which is a very small thing.
But between 1 and 4 grays, your blood cells start to die, and being exposed to more than 4 grays can be fatal. Officially, there are only four victims in the case. And three of them were directly linked to the junkyard.
Israel and Admilson, the workers who dismantled the radiotherapy device, and Maria Gabriela, Devair's wife, were exposed to about 5 grays each and had internal bleeding and respiratory problems before dying. But the most famous victim in the case was the child Leide, Devair's niece, who dined with cesium-stained hands. She was exposed to 6 grays and suffered kidney and lung damage, internal bleeding and hair loss.
Leide was even isolated in the hospital room, because the employees were afraid to go near her. Unfortunately, she didn't resist and ended up dying in the hospital. After his death, about 2000 people tried to prevent the funeral to take place, fearing the body would contaminate the cemetery area.
So she ended up being buried in a sealed lead coffin and carried away by a crane. However, even if only these four people are considered the official victims it's estimated that more than a hundred people died in the following years due to radiation. One of them was Devair himself, who's been exposed to 7 grays and died in 1994 victim of cancer 7 years after being exposed.
Other inhabitants suffered not only serious health problems, but also a lot of prejudice, being excluded by the residents of neighborhoods that were not affected. And as no one wanted to live in the contaminated regions, several families who lived in these places have sold their homes for prices far below what they were worth. The case went to court and in 1996, three doctors and a physicist linked to the Goianian Radiotherapy Institute, the clinic that abandoned the device, were convicted of manslaughter, when there is no intention of killing.
However, two years later, the sentences were extinguished by a pardon from President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Today, Cesium-137 tailings are buried in two concrete boxes in the metropolitan region of Goiânia, along with another 6,000 tons of contaminated material. That is the site of the Center-West Regional Center for Nuclear Sciences, which conducts research and monitors the effects of radiation in the area.
Experts guarantee that there is no longer any risk of contamination at the site, but many people in the area are still very afraid of radiation. It's understandable. After all, knowing that a nuclear accident which affected the health of more than 1000 people, happened right next to your house, is something difficult to forget.
This has been the video explaining the Cesio-137 accident, if you liked it and want me to make more videos like this, let me know. Also subscribe to the channel. Follow me on Instagram @fecastanhari, to recieve our news, stuff I don't post here, only on Instagram.
And calm down, don't go away yet, because you can click here to watch our Animated Nostalgia about the effects of the atomic bomb, it's really cool. Also watch our video on the story of Chernobyl. Watch our latest Animated Nostalgia about the great problem of garbage in the world, it's also a very cool video, click here.
Thanks for watching! Kisses!
