.. two junk collectors broke into an abandoned building in Goiana, a city of some one million inhabitants and about 200 km from the capital of Brazil.
The building had been home to a private radiation clinic and was left unattended when closed down. There they found a disused gamma-ray radiotherapy unit that was abandoned by the owners, removed the lead head of the machine, and took it home. From inside they extracted a metal capsule containing some 20 g of caesium chloride. The capsule was forced open and they released the powdered compound of highly radioactive Caesium-137. The activity of the material was about 1400 curies when the accident happened (1).
Most of the radioactive material was spilt over an old rug under two mango trees and the lead box, containing the rest of the caesium, was sold to the owner of a nearby junk yard. The luminescent blue powder, which glowed in the dark, attracted the attention of relatives and friends. It was manipulated and rubbed into the body by several people, including children. These people were contaminated and exposed to intense radiation doses, and they also contaminated the local environment which then irradiated and/or contaminated others.
The first symptoms of radiation poisoning (nausea, vomiting, headaches, diarrhoea) were felt shortly by those who had the greater contact with the radioactive material. They sought help in local pharmacies and hospitals and were treated as victims of some infectious-contagious disease (not surprisingly, because patients all came from the same families and locality). <snip>
Given that cancer and genetic effects can appear many years after exposure to nuclear radiation, it is impossible to make a precise count of the number of victims. No less difficult is any assessment of the psychological damage done to those most directly affected by the accident. What is known is that from 30 September to 22 December 1987, 111,800 people were tested in the facilities improvised at the football stadium and 249 were found to be contaminated, either internally or externally. Of these, 129 had body contamination and 49 needed hospitalisation (21 needed intensive care). In spite of the medical measures taken (the external and internal decontamination of the victims and the treatment of wounds) five people who were directly exposed to the caesium died (four soon after the event) and one had a limb amputated. Six hundred people are still being monitored medically. <snip>"
International Newsletter on Physics Education
International Commission on Physics Education
International Union of Pure and Applied Physics
Number 35, November 1997
Not to Commemorate, But to Remember:
10 Years Since the Goiania Nuclear Accident
Arden Zylbersztajn, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil
Mike Watts, Roehampton Institute, London
http://www.physics.umd.edu/ripe/icpe/newsletters/n35/"For eight weeks in late 1983, Vicente Sotelo Alardin's pick-up, sidelined by a flat tire, sat parked on a back street near his house in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso. Countless people passed by it each day, and neighborhood children climbed into the truck bed to play games.
No one knew the truck was dangerously "hot." From a distance of less than one meter, it emitted 50 rads an hour of radioactivity, enough to reduce the number of white blood cells that protect the body from infection and to inflict at least temporary damage to the chromosomes of anyone close by. <snip>
The trouble had begun two months earlier, when Sotelo was sent to haul away some unused material from a warehouse operated by his employer, the Centro Médico in Juarez. Among the several pieces of equipment Sotelo and a coworker transported across town to the Jonke Fénix junkyard was a 20-year-old Picker 3000 radiotherapy machine that the hospital had purchased from the X-ray Equipment Co. in Fort Worth, which had in turn bought the unit from Methodist Hospital in Lubbock. Once in Juarez, the machine had languished in the warehouse for lack of a qualified technician to fix it.
Sotelo's mistake was in pilfering an unmarked capsule from the load and throwing it into the back of his pick-up truck. Later, when he pried open the capsule, out spilled 6,010 small, silvery pellets that looked like cake decorations but were in fact loaded with high levels of the radioactive cobalt 60 isotope. Some of the pellets rolled into the truck bed and onto the road. Others remained inside the capsule, which Sotelo took to the junkyard and sold as scrap for the peso equivalent of $9. There, the capsule was dumped near a huge magnet used to load scrap metal onto trucks bound for two northern Mexico foundries. <snip>"
El Cobalto
http://www.window.state.tx.us/border/ch09/cobalto.htmlThe second might be the incident you're remembering ...
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