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?”