A young girl is sitting in her kitchen absolutely
mesmerized by the gift her father just brought home. That was a seemingly magical, glowing powder,
that glimmered on the kitchen floor like something out of a fairytale. The six year old scoops up handfuls of the
radiant dust…she gets some of it in her sandwich…she smothers her face and body
with it and excitedly says to her pop, “Look at me…I’m glowing. I’m a sparkling little angel.” A few weeks later and the child was no longer
magical…she was dying. Her hair had fallen out…her body was swollen. She was bleeding from the inside and her lungs
and kidneys weren’t functioning very well. When this girl was laid to rest she had to
be buried in a specially-made fiberglass coffin lined with lead. That day was hellish for all involved because
news of the glowing girl had gotten around. A riot broke out at the cemetery. Thousands of people were in a state of shock
and fear. This dead girl, they shouted, would poison
the very land. You might now be thinking, “What the hell
was all that about!” This is the story of what’s now called the
“Goiania accident”, or sometimes, “Brazil’s Chernobyl”, and now we’ll take you back
to the start. Goiânia is the capital city of the state
of Goiás in Central-Western Brazil. This city would become known for being home
to one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters, although the story still remains relatively
unknown. In the Fall of 1987, a couple of guys, guys
we might call scavengers, had found a source where they might find a bit of scrap to sell. This was an abandoned hospital, a veritable
treasure trove for men down on their luck and experiencing hard times. Part of this hospital when it was up and running,
like most other hospitals in the world had had a radiotherapy department. If a patient needed this treatment then of
course the hospital needed a source of radiation. This is not the kind of thing that hospitals
just leave lying around when they close up though- or at least they shouldn’t. Unfortunately for a lot of people, lying around
in that hospital was a small canister made of steel and lead. The guys, named Roberto dos Santos Alves and
Wagner Mota Pereira, snuck into the abandoned radiotherapy department and they discovered
this mysterious canister. What they were totally unaware of was that
inside that canister was a capsule that contained around 93 grams (3.3 oz) of deadly radioactive
caesium chloride made with the radioisotope, caesium-137. This stuff in short is used to kill cancer
cells in humans, and only a very tiny amount is used during radiation therapy. People have actually died during therapy,
just because they were exposed to too much of the stuff. In this case, the canister was part of equipment
that had been used for something called External-beam radiation therapy. That just means pointing a beam at a certain
part of the body and blasting where the cancer is. Roberto and Wagner had no idea about this
kind of treatment and simply thought they had found a good bit of scrap. They threw it into a wheelbarrow with some
other items and off they went on their merry way. The date was September 13, 1987, and the two
guys were heading to Roberto’s house with their haul. When they got there they proceeded to try
and prize open the canister. It looked expensive, and they damn well wanted
to know what was inside. Later that night, both men started throwing
up and they turned a shade of yellow. That didn’t stop them, though, and they
fought with that canister into the night. The next day, Wagner got really dizzy and
experienced severe diarrhea. He seemed to be the worst hit, but he only
went to the hospital when his left hand swelled up and looked like a boxing glove. He ended up having to have a few of his fingers
partially amputated, and he and Roberto felt ill for a while to come. The thing was, he had no idea that a hunk
of metal and lead had caused the loss of his fingers. The doctors told him that he had a bad case
of food poisoning. Word got back to Roberto about the food poisoning,
and while he felt bad for his fingerless buddy, he kept hacking away at that canister. He eventually got into it and unbeknownst
to him, what he now held in his hand was the caesium capsule. That hand, and arm, would eventually be surgically
removed, but much, much worse was to come. Before the amputation and before the painful
blisters appeared on Roberto’s arm, what he saw in that capsule was a spell-binding,
glowing blue powder. He wondered what it was, and thought perhaps
it was an explosive. That made sense in a way since the canister
looked something like a bomb. He tried to ignite the stuff and nothing happened,
and now feeling a little upset that all he’d discovered was a powder, albeit a magical
fluorescent powder, he took all his haul to another scrap yard and sold it. The owner of that yard was one Devair Alves
Ferreira, a man whose life was about to change forever. Little did he know that he had purchased a
time bomb that would lead him into a very unpleasant downward spiral. On the night of the purchase he was walking
around his scrapyard when he saw something awesome, something spooky, otherworldly. Before his eyes he witnessed a blue light
lighting up the dark scrapyard, and it was being emitted by that chunk of metal he’d
just bought. Devair was far from a scientist, and what
he thought he had on his hands was something related to the supernatural. He then got his two young junkyard employees
to get more of the blue stuff out of the capule. This job would turn out to be a fate worse
than death. Excitedly, he brought that capsule and its
glowing powder into the house. The next day he got his friends round to the
house to witness this spectacular glowing dust. They loved it, and some of them took some
of it home with them. Meanwhile, Devair’s wife, Gabriela, was
starting to feel rather unwell. No one of course thought it was anything to
do with the glowing dust, and so Devair sold a bit of that stuff to his brother Ivo. What was left of the dust and the bounty from
the scrapyard was sold to yet another scrapyard, and by this time Ivo was already playing around
with the blue dust. He brought the beast into his own home and
spread some around on the kitchen floor. This was when his six-year old daughter, Leide
das Neves Ferreira, became overwhelmed with excitement and started throwing the magical
dust around and applying it to her body. She saw some of it get into her sandwich and
thinking it was probably harmless she just ate it. That would turn out to be the biggest mistake
in her life. Another person there put his finger into the
dust and started drawing on his chest. That finger you now probably know, stood little
chance of staying attached to the man’s body. Meanwhile, Gabriela noticed that she wasn’t
the only one feeling really ill. It seemed to her that anyone who had come
in contact with that magical dust was falling ill. She was the first person to put two and two
together and she put the canister and the capsule into a plastic bag and headed to the
local hospital. Soon a physicist was on the job and he had
the equipment to measure radiation. He pretty much knew what he was looking at
and soon discovered that the scrap haul was emitting very dangerous levels of radiation. What happened next was what you might call
the beginning of a national disaster. The local and national government were called
and radiation experts turned up at those scrapyards, the hospital, and all the people’s houses
that had been exposed to the radiation. Some of those people were now in hospital
and they were gravely ill. Others who’d been in contact with the magic
blue dust were worried out of their minds. In fact, when the people of the city found
out what had happened they wondered if they had a nuclear disaster on their hands and
they cursed those scavengers for what they’d brought into their city. 130,000 people in total went to visit doctors,
fearing that they had come close to the source, although only 250 people in the end had actually
been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. Just twenty folks experienced radiation sickness
and had to spend some time in intensive care. A further thousand people were tested, and
while they had been exposed to more radiation than they would have in everyday life, the
chances of it affecting them negatively were pretty much none. Still, hysteria was pervasive, and the people
couldn’t believe that something so dangerous could have been left behind at an abandoned
hospital and found by dudes looking for junk to sell. 20 years later it was determined that caesium-137
related diseases were no higher in that city than they were in the rest of Brazil. Even though that was the case, compensation
was paid to people who had been contaminated. In fact, the hysteria got so much that Goiania
became associated with radiation and many people stopped visiting there. Products made in that city were also shunned
by outsiders, since people feared that what came out of Goiania had to be contaminated. This turned out to be quite the overreaction. But what about those who’d discovered the
stuff. What was their fate? Well, they couldn’t exactly go home. During the clean-up operation it was discovered
that massive amounts of radiation were at the houses and the junkyards of those people
who’d played with the blue dust. Those houses were demolished and the area
around the junkyards was sectioned off. Another 42 houses in the areas close to those
yards were also demolished. The people who’d lived in those houses of
course had moved around before they knew about the reality of the blue dust, and so the radiation
spread to vehicles. Fourteen cars had been contaminated and had
to be destroyed or decontaminated, and three buses were found to have been exposed to high
amounts of radiation. Five pigs were also contaminated, but we can’t
tell you what their fate was. We guess it involved a trip to the incinerator. Acid and Prussian blue was used to decontaminate
surfaces, and the latter was also used in an attempt to decontaminate affected people. The problem was, some of the victims as you
know had literally covered themselves in that stuff and the unfortunate girl had even eaten
some. As you also know, she died a horrible death
and her funeral caused a riot. Even though her body was encased so the radiation
would never spread into the soil, local folks were not happy about the girl being laid to
rest near their patch of land. So, what about the two guys who first found
the canister, Roberto and Wagner? Well, from what we can see, besides some missing
fingers and a lost arm , those guys were ok. It was the two Devair families and the workers
at the Devair junkyard who were the biggest victims. Some people who had visited their house to
watch the spectacle of “Carnival Glitter” suffered radiation burns and some folks who’d
dipped their fingers into the dust lost those fingers. Two workers, sadly aged just 18 and 22, in
the Devair junkyard died of internal hemorrhaging and other health problems a month after playing
with the dust, and as for Mr. Devair himself, well, he surprisingly survived the ordeal. His wife, Gabriela, also soon lost her hair,
and in weeks after exposure she began bleeding from the inside. About a month after she messed around with
the magic dust, Gabriella’s body and mind were devastated by the radiation and she died. As for Devair and Ivo Ferreira, the two brothers,
it was unusual that they survived even though they’d been exposed to such high doses of
radiation. We say survived, but you can only imagine
what their lives were like after that. Not only did they mourn for the people who
had died, but most of Brazil had painted them as idiots and killers. They became outcasts, pariahs on the streets
of Goiânia. No one wanted to go near them, and no one
wanted to communicate with them. Devair fell into despair and started drinking
heavily, and consequently he died of cirrhosis, still a fairly young man. Ivo lasted longer, but his depression led
to ill-health and he also died prematurely. Even though the story has been compared to
the Chernobyl disaster, it wasn’t anywhere near as big. The Chernobyl clean-up operation was so much
larger and the spread of various radioactive contaminants was far more wide-reaching. The stories are not really comparable. Brazil’s accident was fairly easy to contain. The story is just outstanding because of the
negligence involved and the fact the country was put into a state of fear because of a
few people that wanted some extra cash for junk. Now go watch these two shows, “How I Survived
Chernobyl” and “What Caused the Catastrophic Nuclear Accident in Chernobyl?”
