Goiânia accident

On September 13, 1987, two men entered an abandoned, partly demolished,

hospital in Goiânia Brazil. The two men found a teletherapy unit and thought they could
get some money for the scraps. Little did the men know they were taking home highly
radioactive cesium chloride. Three days after taking the capsule home one of the men
successfully opened it with a screwdriver revealing the glowing blue powder within.
Using the screwdriver he scooped some of the powder out. Thinking that it was some
sort of gun powder he tried to light it on fire, but it did not ignite. A couple of days later
the capsule was sold to a scrapyard. Ferreira, the owner of the scrapyard, noticed the
blue glow coming from the capsule, he was intrigued by the glowing powder he brought
the capsule to his house and started showing his friends and family. On September
21st one of Ferreira’s friends was able to get some of the powder out using a
screwdriver. Later that day Ferreira’s wife became ill. The next day Ferreira’s brother
scraped more powder out of the capsule and took it to his home, where he sprinkled it
on the floor for his 6-year-old daughter to play with. Ferreira’s wife was the first to
notice there was something wrong with the many people falling seriously ill around
them. On September 28th she took the capsule to a hospital in a plastic bag. The next
day it was confirmed that the capsule was radioactive and by the end of the day,
everyone nationwide knew about the incident. The following days as many as 130,000
people arrived at local hospitals to see if they were contaminated, of those 250 were
found who had indeed come in contact with the radioactive material. In total 20 people
were diagnosed with radiation sickness and needed treatment. Ferreira’s niece ended
up passing away, as well as an employee at the scrapyard.
I picked this story because I felt it was one of the more mundane cases of
radiation sickness/ exposure, there was no explosion it was just human nature that
caused the Goiânia accident. Although to some of us it would raise flags seeing a
glowing blue powder, but others may think nothing of it. This case is a shining example
of why radiation safety is so important. Without realizing it many people got exposed to
fatal levels of radiation because the teletherapy capsule wasn’t removed from the
abandoned hospital. Granted they did post a guard at the hospital because they knew
about the left behind radiation equipment, but could there have been a better solution?
Maybe even signs stating the contents were radioactive and could be deadly, or moving
the radioactive material to a different site while rights to the hospital were being
debated. We should not just assume that the general public will know such equipment
could contain material that would greatly harm them. I feel it is our job to make sure
people understand that radiation is dangerous and that at certain levels it can kill you,
even without a bomb going off.

Jeanette, thank you so much for sharing about Three Mile Island. Although I had heard
the name of the event before but never really did anything about it. It was interesting to
learn that it was caused by the simple act of a valve getting stuck. Honestly thinking
about it if you know you are working with radioactive material wouldn’t you create some
sort of safeguard for this sort of thing? Especially when it has the potential to be fatal
to not only those in the facility but if the core did combust those in the surrounding area.
It is very lucky that no one died with this incident though it could have ended a lot
differently.