The Goiania Radiological Happening of 1987 | Episode 33

You know the story about that guy He started with a paper clip and he traded it all the way up to a Porsche. This episode's kind of like that, but replace paper clip and porsche with cancer and here we go. Hello and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together we're going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, not a lot of high stories turn into full on nightmares, So this is our first. It's a kind of crossover crime slash disaster episode. We're going to talk about some non sexual swelling and burning. We're going to see a punch up at a funeral, and by the end, someone's arm is going to bubble off. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. In case you hadn't heard, I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. You don't really say it like that. It's pronounced Toronto. It's what you get when Canada decides to have in New York City. Toronto used to be Old York City. New York City is just kind of riding on our tails. You might remember us from the ikea Monkey, or we had that mayor who smoke crack, yes, crack. Well, most people think of us, they think of the sea and Tower. It's the tallest object in the entire Western hemisphere and it gives us one of the most identifiable skylines on the planet. It helps us draw on about thirty million visitors a year, which yeah, does sound like a lot, but by population, we are the fourth biggest city in North America, only behind Mexico City, New York and la And for all the visitors who come to a big city like ours, there will be some who would rather see it through an underground tunnel, grape or by parcouring onto a rooftop. These are the urban explorers and the one who experienced the abandoned and hidden sides of a city growing up by new one and he went by the name Ninjalicious. He explored everything from catacombs to missile silos, and through him I learned the joy of a legal exploration. He passed away back in two thousand and five, and this story is in his memory. We're going to be doing a kind of urban exploration of our own today, but we're going to be heading south of the border to do it technically, south of a bunch of borders. Grab your passport, your rhinestone studded high hill boots, and your sunscreen, because we are heading to beautiful Brazil. Ah, Brazil historic as hell, more UNESCO heritage sites than you could count on two hands, beaches, Giant Jesus Arnival, the Amazon Football, questionable street food, but we'll get into that. Brazil is so big it covers most of South America, and it borders every other country there except Ecuador and Chili. If we do get separated, I want you to remember a couple of things. Brazil has some different laws all countries do. If you are caught skiing while drunk, that's against the law. If you kill a bigfoot that's also against the law. But if you did end up in a Brazilian clink, prisoners are allowed to reduce their sentence by riding a bike to generate electricity, or you can actually shave four days off just for every book you read. They like the prisoners to be released more educated than fitter. The sunscreen was a good call. We're fairly close to the equator and you don't want to get stuck on a return flight with radiation burns. Yep. Remember sunburns are radiation burns. And speaking of have you ever had cancer? I'm not being glib, and I know that's a terrible question. It's probably the worst one I've ever asked, but it is a thing. And when the people of Guyana, Brazil were diagnosed with it, the Institute Guyania de Radiotherapia is where they went for treatment. We're just going to call it the igr Did somebody say Guyana? We did. It's a city of about a million and it's the capital of the state of Goyas. Who will be spending our time in one of the poorer areas of Brazil. But poor is relative, of course. Guenia is known for its cattle ranches and cereal farms, but it's also surprisingly artistic. It sits right on the Brazilian plateau, and it's known for its parklands, and its monuments and museums. If you like tree lined streets, but also funky ass nightclubs, welcome. But remember we are here to visit a cancer clinic. So back to the IGR. It was a privately owned radiotherapy clinic and it served the community from nineteen seventy one all the way to nineteen eighty five, when it packed up and moved to a better building. The original building was slag for demolition. It was going to be part of the grounds for a new convention center going in. But now it was nineteen eighty seven, and except for the fact that it looked semi demolished, not much had really happened in the place over the last two years. I mean, why would anyone want to try to break into an abandoned hospital. If you believe in ghosts, then an abandoned hospital or medical center has to be like the rave scene from the Matrix, whichever film that was, but for dead people. But scrap traders are a different breed. No one keeps their ears to the ground closer than scrappers. They basically recycle junk to turn into cash. All you need is an entrepreneurial spirit and a keen eye for spotting treasure in other people's garbage. From the richest of the g seven countries to the poorest of the poor. Scrap trading is seen as an environmentally valuable pastime, but most people who actually do it see it as a way to keep food on the table. You'd be surprised how many rarer valuable metals can hide away in an old building and rumor had it when the old IGR was abandoned some of the medical quimit never moved to the new location. Roberto dos Santos Salvos and Wagner Mota Pereira were a pair of local scrap traders by trade, and word of chunky machinery resting up in the old IGR clinic was like a dinner bell going off, and the IGR had three things going for it. First, there was the whole abandonment issue. Second, it was guarded, but only until it wasn't. And third it was really close to home. And now prepare yourself to hear the plot of the most dramatic high story that you have never heard of. Only spoiler The highest portion of the story is the least interesting part. Picture the oceans eleven Montage as Alvis and Pereira cased the place, learning the guard schedules, gathering the tools they were going to need, rehearsing all the acrobatics they would employ, and timing out their practice runs. Obviously, the date of the heist was September thirteenth, nineteen eighty seven, and cue the circus music. The tools they brought consisted mostly of hammers, screwdrivers in a wheelbarrow that wouldn't need to distract her sedate a guard because you never showed. He went to the movies with his family that night. And let me say this, with a rotten tomato score of forty percent, Herbie Goes Bananas is not the film you want to lose your job over. And they didn't exactly mission impossible their way into the building because most of the clinic, together with some of the surrounding properties, had already been demolished, and there were giant holes in some of the walls big enough to drive a small car through, certainly a wheelbarrow. Most of the treatment rooms had apparently been quote used by vagrants. And that's all I'm going to say about that. Alvis and Pereira searched the building for anything of value. Now it's one thing to pull copper wiring out of a wall. It's quite another to turn a corner and find yourself face to face with a piece of medical equipment the size of a small car. One of the treatment rooms contained something that looked like an MRI machine had a baby with a planetarium laser show projector. They swarmed it like zombies on a corpse and dismantled it as much as they could. Inside the machine, they found and removed an interesting looking component. It was like a capsule about the size of a short thermos, but with a little window on top. It had been sitting in a kind of rotating wheel. Think of it like a bullet chambered in a revolver. Whatever it was, it was made of steel, and even the small little window on top was incredibly well built. Alvis threw it in the wheelbarrow with the other loot they'd found to take back home for sorting. They had a pretty good haul that night, and they were eager to break everything down for salvage. Now. I don't know what kind of greasy spoon, fast food diner, or food cart these guys celebrated their haul out on the way back home, But even before the Rooster Road. Both were already up the next day, dizzy, sweaty and barfee. Alvis figure they had food poisoning, and Perreira agreed, but once the butt stuff started, he went to a clinic about it. The docks On staff agreed with Alvis and sent him home to rest. But both these men had dollar signs in their eyes by now, and they opted to keep futzing with the mystery canister, barfing the butt stuff aside. The can was undeniably cool looking, but they just couldn't figure out how to open it. Later that night, Alvis was walking by the workspace when the lights were off, and he noticed that the canister was actually glowing, and that was a real good sign that this thing was special read expensive. The little window the aperture on top was the only real obvious weak point, and it was the source of the glow that Alvis described, so they concentrated their efforts there. Barrera spent hours trying to break in or unscrew the thing until his hand started to swell and Alvis took over, and two days later, while stabbing away at it with a screwdriver under a mango tree, he finally made a hole the hole was small, but it still counted, and from the tiny stab hole came but glow again. He investigated the insides with a screwdriver and very gingerly removed a tiny bit of powder from inside the canister. Whatever it was, it was beautiful and it glowed a rich blue. Now, before I tell you what he did next, I should say that Brazil's education system in the nineteen eighties was not the greatest. It's no knock against the country, it's just their education system failed this kid so bad. He finds a strange glowing powder, wonders if it might be explosive and holds it over his zippo to find out. And you're not hearing the doomsday in song right now, so we continue. The powder wasn't explosive. It was way worse, but we'll come back to that too. These guys had no idea why it glowed, but they knew what they liked when they saw it, and they knew others would too, So they sold everything to a scrapyard owner named davere Ferrara. It was that kind of trading up a paper clip into a Porsche kind of thinking. Ferrera took possession of it and later that same night, he noticed the glow for himself, and now he had dollar signs for eyes. He may not have been a fully superstitious man, but he was stitious enough to think that this could possibly be some kind of enchanted, supernatural gemstone. He didn't know whether to sell it or build a temple to it, so he brought it in side for everyone to check out while he thought it over. Over the next three days, an endless parade of curiosity seekers filed through his home to see it, and between the US and the OS people were still trying to increase the size of the hole. On the twenty first of September, one of her Ara's friends was busily attacking the thing when eureka, he managed to stab through the final layer of glass protecting them from i mean keeping them from fully exploring the inside. They peered into it with unblinking eyes, and when they shook it, they freed blue powdery grains about the size of rice in total, one fifth of a pound's worth, weighed about as much as a deck of cards. This was pay dirt. Whatever it was, this was going to make them rich. But it wasn't just the dollar signs. It was also what the hell didness of the whole thing Devere wanted to share. He even started lending grains to friends and family to take home. Thanks. All in all a great day till his wife Gabriella became sick. She was dizzy, sweaty, vomiting, and yes she had but stuff. She hadn't eaten anything strange, but she had sprinkled some of the beautiful blue dust on her nightgown in bed sheets that evening. Meanwhile, back of Pereira's Wagner's giant swollen hand started burning. His fingers kind of wanted to fall off, and his arm ulcerated so badly that eventually they were going to amputate it. But we'll come back to that. And for the time being they called it food poisoning, but they sent them to a tropical disease clinic just to double check. Again. I have no idea how bad food poisoning in Brazil is, but I'm excitedly disinterested to find out. By the twenty fifth of September, Devere had decided to sell to a third scrapyard, but not all of it. By this time, so much of the powder remained as residue spread across Guena by the Curious. All told, twenty two different families had already had possession of this thing, and d Vere's brother Ivo, before he sold it, he stole the too, took it home, spread it on the floor for his six year old daughter to play in. Little Leeda de Nevis Ferrara was so fascinated by the missus glowing powder she decorated herself with it to show off to her mom. She ate a sandwich frosted in it, and she fell sick almost immediately. Her mom notified the authorities that something was wrong. Too many people around her had become sick, like sick, sick, all at the same time. A few hundred years earlier, she probably would have been burned to death as a witch for bringing it up. And by September twenty eighth, just fifteen days into all of this, Gabriella went around town with one of her husband's employees and they collected all the offending materials they could find and took a bus to the nearest hospital. Wait they collected in their hands, you ask, of course not. They put it in a plastic bag. You'd think by now that whatever was in this bag was probably going to melt its way through the sack, but it didn't, and the fact that it stayed in the bag at all helped save the hospital a lot of cleanup. That's right, if you haven't figured it out yet, the blue powder was as radioactive as fun. The man who carried the bag kind of had it over his shoulder the whole time, and he received a massive, deep blistering burn from the experience. Gabriella put the bag on the doctor's desk and told him simply that this was killing her family first, because they were barfing and blistering and butt stuffing in the clinic. They got sent to the Tropical Disease Clinic too. The more the doctor started to clue into what was going on, the more worried he became. He moved the bag from his desk to a chair in the courtyard of the health center and he backed out of there. No word on exactly how many people came by to take a look inside the bag. Medical staff at the Tropical Disease Clinic had a few thoughts on what they were seeing. The symptoms and blistering and dead blood cells samples suggested that these people had been exposed to radiation. They asked someone to find that bag and give it a good Geiger countering. When the first detector was turned on, it went crazy and detected full scale radiation, don't matter where in the room. They pointed it, just like in our first episode, and they assumed it was broken. Two hours later a new one came by. The new one had the exact same reaction, and at this point the light bulbs had gone off. The authorities jumped into action. When the fire department arrived, they wanted to throw the bag in the nearest river. The investigators were able to put together a rough timeline of how the powder traveled and backtracked the path to the source, and they found radiation everywhere they went. The military got involved and they took possession of the container. It took them a while to figure out the whole story, because there's something about stabbing a thing with a screwdriver for several days in a row that makes identifying serial numbers so unrewarding. But they did figure it out. The part in question had come from a teletherapy unit. That big ass doctor who looking machine we talked about assessuspan F three thousand to be exact, So what the hell is that you ask. It looked like barbarism in another hundred years. But in the modern age, we either inject cancer patients with radioactive chemicals to destroy cancer cells, or in some cases, we can use an external beam therapy machine. It's not really like a traditional aser machine. The beam is made up of high energy radiation and they use it to target a patients enter what nots To deliver a beam exactly to a patient's tumor. The radiation destroys the cells, preventing further growth. That's the idea, at least that little aperture window they had so much difficulty with. It opens and closes like a camera shutter. It's what creates the focal point of the targeting beam. Computers calculate the voltage of the beam, size of the radiation field, the distance between the patient and the beam, and even the angle of the beam being fired. The radiation plan usually will consist of two or more beams, just for ghose distribution. They want to maximize the treatment, but they also really want to minimize exposure to you know, all the rest of the your tissue. They certainly never intended for anyone to rip the radioactive core from the unit and play with it. For all the time people had spent trying to get into this thing, they were unknowingly firing beams of cell killing radiation all willy milly through their skulls. Things got real serious, real fast, and the city, state, and national governments were all aware of the incident by the end of the day. So what the hell was happening? Well, let me try to boil this into English. The reason the container took so much punishment was because it was shield it would lead and steel. And the reason Pereira's arm bubbled off was because it contained about ninety three grams or three and a half ounces of highly radioactive caesium one thirty seven. What is caesium one thirty seven. Well, the short of it is you normally find it in nuclear missiles or reactors. It's a relatively unstable element that breaks down nicely to create nuclear fission. It's also a constant source of beta and gamma particles. You won't feel or hear, or smell or taste or see them, but beta particles will sit on your skin or your clothes and radiate you from the outside. Gamma particles straight up, don't give a fuck about nothing. They'll blow right through you and leave a path of death and unraveling DNA in their wake. Caesium is the kind of stuff you get as a byproduct from nuclear fission of more well known isotopes like uranium and plutonium, and they're damn lucky. Alva's first instinct hadn't been to pour water on it. If you had little of this stuff in a test tube and you added water, the test tube would explode in a torrent of caesium hydroxide and hydrogen gas. In fact, that was kind of one of the theories about why it glowed the way it did. It was just reacting to the moisture it was absorbing from the air. So you're at the thrift shop. You buy an amazing lamp. Then it's beautiful and it looks amazing in your place, but it kind of hums, and when you turn off a light, it's still glowing. You lost the receipt and they won't take it back. So let's talk about your purchase decision for a minute. Radiation is everywhere. The light that lets you see is a kind of radiation. The concrete outside your home emits radiation. Lots of natural minerals all around us do it all the time. We just call it background radiation. It falls from the sky, comes up from the ground. Fortunately for you, it's fairly benign and it's not going to bubble your face off. But knowing what to do if you found yourself in a situation where background radiation became more of an urgent foreground topic are the things that you should be thinking about. Time, distance and shielding. It's the radiological stop, drop and roll. The longer you're exposed to radiation, the more you're gonna absorb. The closer you are to the source, the more you'll absorb, and the least obstructed path between you and the source is the worst one. You know, the way that heat feels when you put a little distance between yourself and it. Exact same thing with radioactivity, and that's where the shielding comes in. Behind a chair, or a tree or a concrete wall, they're all gonna have some effect in protecting you. It's why nuclear reactors store radioactive parts in water, and X ray clinics give you a lead blanket time distance, and shielding in the event of a radiological incident like a bomb goes off. The best advice is to get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned. Just pretend you are extremely introverted. You want to shelter inside in the middle of the building or a basement away from doors and windows. Step one, lose your clothes God and shower no bads. If even a speck, a microgram or a millionth of a gram made its way inside you, it will continue cooking you internally until you too require a trip to a radiotherapy clinic. Shelter in place for at least twenty four hours, and for God's sake, spring your pets inside. Hopefully you've got some bottled water and you're ready to play. I remember you with all those cans in your pantry. If you don't have bottled water, you can fill buckets or your tub and just cross your fingers that it hasn't become toxic. When you are thirsty enough, you will drink out of your own toilet. And let's quickly remind ourselves about the Greek pantheon of alpha, beta and gamma radiation. Radioactive alpha particles fly through the air, but even a piece of paper could swat them away. Beta particles are more robust and more dangerous, but you can still stop them with the same kind of aluminum foil you use to protect your thoughts. A lot of ignorant but pioneering scientists with brave ideas and bubbling skin had to die for us to learn how bad you want to stop gamma radiation, you better bring a wall lead. The rule of thumb is if you're able to carry the weight of the shielding necessary to protect yourself fully, it's not good enough. Lead is surprisingly heavy and dense, and back in our very first episode, the victims of radiation needed to be buried in hundreds of pounds of it to keep the public safe. And that's why we say book it or cook it. The best disaster is the one you still have time to evade. We compare the mechanics of the teletherapy unit as being like a cameraun. The powder had been held in a kind of a wheel, safely hidden behind a shield of lead, which is only exposed when the aperture opens. Once they ripped out the lead and expose the caesium, the canister turned into a kind of radioactive death ray, the hottest of all hot potatoes, and now news broke like us starter pistol and almost one hundred and thirty thousand people swarmed local hospitals. People were desperate to know if they'd been exposed. And here's the thing, remember Three Mile Island. A month before that happened, the China Syndrome movie just came out, and because of that, it scared the crap out of everyone. Inguania, same thing. People were having a collective psychological meltdown because Chernobyl just exploded a year before. So yeah, most people were worried that they'd been radiated with incurable diseases. People expected blood draws and lab tests and yep. Psytogenetic analysis was going to be used to help identify the severely irradiated, but step one was simply to Geiger counter the line. Two hundred and fifty people were pulled aside, some of them still had contaminated material on them. Forty nine people were admitted to hospital, and twenty needed to be treated for significant radiation sickness. Further seriously impacted. Triage meant decontaminating their skin and dealing with all the desquamation. Oh, what's that. It's a weird word. Well, it's just a fancy way of saying that your skin is peeling off from radiation. Burns. Of the two hundred and fifty people pulled aside, just over half managed to ingest the stuff, but only in very small doses, and none of them walked away with more than thall it a one in four hundred chance of developing cancer. A thousand other people developed no more than a one in twelve hundred risk, which was good news because doctors did not want to become the bad guy. Here. At Chernobyl and three Mile Island, the authorities were not exactly on the ball and were remembered terribly but not here. They didn't have a formal plan already in place for something like this, but a pamphlet on what you should know about radioactivity and radiation was quickly created and distributed to a quarter of a million homes, and a twenty four hour telephone service was set up to field questions from the public. They did everything they could to keep people calm and reassured. Doctors encouraged medical staff to explain to people what they were doing, step by step and why in as simple terms as possible. Brazilian medical staff used patience and empathy to do this terrible job. They even accepted water and food from people's homes to gain their trust. Gabrielle Ferreira fell ill about three days after her initial exposure, only a few days after her daughter. She lost her hair and developed bleeding of the limbs, eyes, and digestive tract not to mention the confusion and diarrhea and renal failure. Israel Baptista dos Santos and Admiral san alvelsd Suza both worked for her husband, and they spent no small amount of time trying to open this thing. They really just wanted to extract the lead from the unit, but instead they got respiratory and lymphatic complications, internal bleeding, heart damage, and death. Post mortems showed hemorrhagic and septic complications, meaning their cells and organs began to melt and released poisons into their blood, which further damaged organs, which turned off like dominoes. They had been given everything from Prussian blue, which is the thing that traps and prevents certain radioactive elements from getting absorbed in the body, to a new hormone like drug called granulocite macrophage colony stimulating factor, but by that point, so much of the actual radioactive material had migrated from the bloodstream in the the muscle tissue. So yeah. Two months later, everyone had been deemed safe to release from hospitals back in Rio to Guyana, except for the four who never could. The youngest victim of this disaster was little Leeda dannevis Ferrera. She was only six. An international team of doctors and arrived a treat her because at the Marsilio Dias Navy Hospital in Rio, thus staff were too afraid to go near her. She experienced swelling in the upper body, hair loss, kidney and lung damage, and internal bleeding. She died less than a month later. She was to be buried back at home in Goenia. They prepared a special fiber glass coffin lined with lead to prevent the spread of radiation. But try telling that to the locals. Her burial was interrupted by a riot at the cemetery. More than two thousand people thought that her corpse was going to poison the surrounding land. They even blockaded the cemetery roadway with stones and bricks. But Yadi, yadiyada, She was buried nonetheless. But of course it does raise the point, what about all the contamination? To give you a sense of how easily contamination spreads. Radiation was also found in or on three buses, forty two houses, fifteen cars, five pigs, and fifty thousand rolls of toilet paper. The disaster spread significant radioactive contamination throughout the Aeroporto, Central and Ferroviadios districts of Guyenia. Eighty five houses were found to have significant contamination and two hundred individuals were evacuated. The top soil had to be removed. Several homes had to be demolished and all the objects from within those homes, including personal possessions, they were seized and they were incinerated. Vacuums were used to remove dust and plumbing was examined for radioactivity. Painted services were scraped while concrete and other surfaces were etched with acid. Roofs were vacuumed in hose down, but two of the houses had to have their roofs removed. The nearby Olympic Stadium was turned into a staging area for isolating patients. One hundred and twelve thousand people were monitored there. A laboratory was set up in Guania for measuring the caesium content of soil, groundwater sediment and river water drinking water, the air, and the food and all the stuff that needed to leave was placed in metal drums and containers, tens of thousands of them. But the cleanup was slowed by heavy rain that fell for a week, which only further spread caesium into the environment. And remember that plastic bag full of caesium. No one wanted to touch it, and it had been left on the chair in the hospital courtyard this whole time. So eventually used a crane to lower a sewer pipe around it, and it was filled with concrete which sealed it off forever and immediately reduced the measurable radiation levels. Of this seven hundred and seventy people involved in the disaster response and clean up, one hundred and ninety four of them had been exposed. So what the hell happened? Well, to tell you that we need to go back in time, just a little back in nineteen seventy one, when the IGR aimed to purchase the teletherapy units, the National Nuclear Energy Commission had to approve it. The terms of condition page of the manual stated that if there were any changes in the status of the equipment or the facilities, they just had to notify the NNEC when the IGR originally moved back to the end of nineteen eighty five, the fate of the abandoned site it got dragged into court. The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul were the new owners the premises. The IGR had a giant Cobalt sixty tel therapy machine and that came with them, but the ownership and the contents of the clinic space once that came into legal dispute, the Cazium one thirty seven machine had to stay put and the National Nuclear Energy Commission didn't get to hear about any of this. Four months before the theft and disaster, one of the owners of the IGR attempted to remove some objects that had been left in the site, but it had been stopped by the police. The director of espago the people taking over the building, they weren't having it. The courts then threw in security guards to protect the site from them. IGR wrote numerous letters addressed to the National Nuclear Energy Commission requesting them to give permission to remove the tele therapy unit due to the dangers that the object posed. They warned them about the dangers of keeping this kind of thing in an abandoned sight, but they couldn't remove it themselves because of the court order. Everyone acknowledged the situation, but nobody moved on it. So IGR warned the new owners that they needed to take responsibility for a quote, what would happen when the caesium bomb went off. After the disaster, the courts blamed the National Nuclear Energy Commission for not taking it seriously and ordered them to compensate all the victims of the disaster. The three doctors who had owned and operated IGR were charged with criminal negligence, but they couldn't declare the owners of IGR liable, so they had to pay a fine for the poor condition of the building, even though they didn't live there, and the two dudes who stole the unit in the first place were not even mentioned in the suit. In the year two thousand, the National Nuclear Energy Commission was ordered by the eighth Federal Court of Goyaz to pay compensation of about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars US to provide the medical and psychological treatment for the direct and indirect victims of the accident and their descendants all the way down to three generations. As pretty impressive. De Vere and Ivo Ferrara both survived despite their injuries, both men had lost everything, Ivo lost his entire family, and both would later die from non suicidal complications of depression. De vere Ferira died in nineteen ninety four of cirrhosis aggravated by depression and binge drinking, and his brother Ivo smoked himself to death in two thousand and three. The original Tell therapy capsule had been seized by the military as soon as it was discovered, and since then it remains on display at the Escola Thuugh Instrocao especiali Zada for the School of Specialized Instruction in Rio dejian Eiro, and it serves as a reminder of those who participated in the cleanup. Time magazine called the disaster in Goyeenia one of the world's worst nuclear disasters, and the International Atomic Energy Agency called it one of the world's worst radiological insat science. But outside of a small part of Brazil, no one remembers it. Maybe you never heard of it, or the time it happened in Mexico City in sixty two, or the time it happened in Algeria in nineteen seventy eight, or Morocco or Sia Dad Warrez, Mexico back in nineteen eighty three. Here's the difference. Though those other examples didn't have the same showmanship. Those machines used cobalt or something instead of caesium, and it just wouldn't glow because it was so boring. Those occasions would end up with little contamination and no deaths. In nineteen ninety two, just five years after the event, an American cartoon called Captain Planet and the Planet Tears released an episode entitled A Deadly Glow. It followed the basic story of the Guania disaster, except instead of stealing the isotopes, they were delivered by an eco villain, and they even used the same contaminant, the caesium one thirty seven. In that story, of course, two young children played with the danger, but because of cartoon logic, they received a light hearted scolding from Captain Planet instead of a fatal dose of radiation. So, dear listeners, what's the worst thing you've ever broken into? You can tell us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or you can fire us an email at doomsday pod at gmail dot com. Actually we're on TikTok now too. Doomsday dot the dot Podcast older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. If you'd like to support the ongoing production of the show, you can buy me a coffee up, buy me a coffee dot com slash Doomsday, But if you can spare the money and had to choose, we always ask you to consider it making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They are often the first and sometime the only team to get critical intervention to people in life threatening situations, and to date they've helped over three point six million people across seventy five different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmetic dot Ca. On the next episode, Oh seme my lad My French might not be that strong, but neither is the bridge that we're gonna discuss, And I have a strong suspicion it's gonna be a doozy that's actually supposed to be super funny because the way I wrote it with the deux, it's written like it's in French. Anyways, it's the Quebec Bridge collapse of nineteen oh seven. We'll talk soon safety. GoGG goes off and thanks for listen.