S1E6: The Glitter That Killed

Monsters are supposed to be easy to spot. They hide in the dark, behind locked doors, in the parts of the city you already know to fear. The real danger never looks like that. In September of nineteen eighty-seven, in the Brazilian city of Goiânia, the danger looked like treasure. It was a powder that shimmered a deep, impossible blue in the darkness. People carried it home in their pockets. They rubbed it on their skin. They gave it to their children as though it were a gift. And every person who fell in love with it was being poisoned, invisibly, one glittering grain at a time. Morgan Miller: This podcast was brought to you by flooftags, visit floof tags dot com for one of a kind laser engraved pet tags. Morgan Miller: This is the story of Goiânia. A story about the most beautiful poison in the world. Morgan Miller: And like so many stories on this show, it does not begin with an explosion. It begins with a building that nobody wanted to take responsibility for. The Instituto Goiano de Radioterapia — the Goiano radiotherapy institute — was a private cancer clinic in the center of Goiânia, the capital of the state of Goiás. In nineteen eighty-five, the institute moved to new premises. In the half-demolished building it left behind, it left something. A radiotherapy machine, purchased in nineteen seventy-seven and thought to have been made at Oak Ridge, in the United States, built around a small sealed capsule of cesium one thirty-seven — a new-clear isotope with a half-life of thirty years. Inside the machine's lead-and-steel housing sat about ninety-three grams of cesium chloride, a salt made with cesium one thirty-seven, sealed inside a capsule about two inches across. At the time of the accident, it was still radiating at nearly fifty-one terabecquerels — about thirteen hundred seventy-five curies. Stand one meter away from the bare source for less than an hour, and you would absorb the median lethal dose. A machine like that does not get forgotten by accident. It gets forgotten on purpose, one decision at a time. Morgan Miller: Because everyone who mattered knew it was there. In nineteen eighty-six, the abandoned clinic became the subject of a court fight between the institute's owners and the religious society that owned the building. On September eleventh of that year, the court of Goiás was formally informed that radioactive material was sitting in the building. In May of nineteen eighty-seven, the state civil servants' institute that owned the land called the police to stop one of the clinic's owners from removing leftover equipment. That owner, Carlos Figueiredo Bezerril, warned them in writing that the radioactive material was still there, and that they were now responsible, in his words, for what would happen with the cesium bomb. The court posted a security guard. The clinic's owners wrote several letters to Brazil's national new-clear energy commission, warning of the danger — and a court order kept them from removing the machine themselves. So they knew. The court knew. The regulator knew. And the building sat there, half demolished, in the middle of a city of nearly a million people. By May of nineteen eighty-seven, it had been stripped of its gates, its windows, its timberwork, even its roof — an open shell around a machine that could kill in an hour — and no warning sign was ever erected. Morgan Miller: On Sunday, September thirteenth, nineteen eighty-seven, the posted guard did not show up for work. Two men, Roberto dos Santos Alves and Wagner Mota Pereira, walked into the ruined clinic, partially dismantled the teletherapy unit, loaded the heavy source assembly onto a wheelbarrow, and pushed it to Roberto's home. They were after scrap metal. They expected a few days' pay. That same evening, both men began vomiting. Neither of them understood why. Morgan Miller: Two days later, on September fifteenth, Wagner went to a local clinic with nausea that would not stop. The doctor diagnosed a foodborne illness and sent him home to rest. Within days, a burn had opened on his hand — in the exact size and shape of the capsule's aperture window. The radiation had branded him through his skin, in the shape of the thing that had done it. He would eventually lose parts of several fingers to amputation. Morgan Miller: On September sixteenth, Roberto took a screwdriver to the capsule and punctured the aperture window. From the opening came a deep blue light. He scooped out some of the glowing substance with his fingers. For a moment he thought it might be gunpowder. He tried to light it. It would not ignite. He kept dismantling the machine anyway, and the long exposure ulcerated his right forearm so badly that it had to be amputated on October fourteenth. Morgan Miller: The reports all describe the same thing: a deep blue light, shimmering in the dark. What exactly made the powder glow — ionized air, fluorescence, some other effect — the investigators could not say for certain. They noted only that a similar blue had been seen at Oak Ridge, in Tennessee, when a capsule like this one was opened there the following year. Whatever the physics was, the effect was the same everywhere it went. In the dark, it looked like something magical. People who had never seen anything like it could not stop looking at it. That was the trap. Morgan Miller: On September eighteenth, Roberto sold the dismantled pieces to a nearby scrapyard. That night, the scrapyard's owner, Devair Alves Ferreira, noticed the blue glow coming from the punctured capsule in the dark. He thought it was valuable. Perhaps even supernatural. He carried it into his house, and over the next three days he invited friends and family to come and look at the strange, beautiful glowing powder. He had no way of knowing what it was. Nobody in Goiânia did. Morgan Miller: Think about what Devair was seeing. A powder that glowed blue in the darkness of a scrapyard at night — something out of a storybook, something nobody in that neighborhood had ever seen. He carried it into his house the way you would carry something precious. For three days, his home became a small museum of the impossible, and the visitors kept coming — carrying the invisible dust home on their hands and clothes. Morgan Miller: On September twenty-first, a friend of Devair's used a screwdriver to free several rice-sized grains of the glowing material from the capsule. The official report hides him behind the initials E F one — the way these reports protect the living. Devair began sharing the grains — handing out tiny bits of the powder to friends and family like party favors. That same day, his wife, thirty-seven-year-old Maria Gabriela Ferreira, fell ill. She did not know it yet, but she would become the one person in this story who understood what was happening. Morgan Miller: On September twenty-fourth, Devair's brother Ivo scraped more of the dust out of the capsule and carried it to his own house, a short distance away, spreading some of it on his concrete floor. His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, sat on that floor eating an egg. The egg was dusted with the powder. Leide was fascinated by the blue glow, and she rubbed it on her body. She absorbed one gigabecquerel of cesium one thirty-seven, for a total dose of six grays. A fatal dose. Morgan Miller: On September twenty-fifth, Devair sold the scrap metal to a second junkyard. The ruptured capsule went with it, and the workers there tried to break it open with a power saw — scattering the powder further across the city. By now the contamination was spreading through neighborhoods, carried on hands, on clothes, on the wind of ordinary daily life. People across the area were falling ill with nausea, vomiting, burns they could not explain. No one connected them. No one knew there was anything to connect. Morgan Miller: On September twenty-eighth, Maria Gabriela Ferreira did what no institution in Goiânia had managed to do. She was the first person to notice that many of the people around her had all become severely ill at the same time. She went to the rival scrapyard, reclaimed the materials, and carried them to a hospital herself. A woman with a fatal dose of radiation already in her body, doing the job the courts, the clinic owners, and the regulator had all failed to do. She was already dying. But she understood, before the doctors did, that the beautiful powder was the thing connecting them all. Morgan Miller: On September twenty-ninth, a visiting medical physicist happened to be in the city. The report names him only as W F. He confirmed the radioactivity with a scintillation counter and persuaded the authorities to act. By the end of the day, the city government, the state government, and the national government all knew. Sixteen days after two men pushed a wheelbarrow out of a ruined clinic, the country finally understood what had happened in Goiânia. The International Atomic Energy Agency would later publish a full report on the accident — the document that still, nearly forty years later, hides the living behind initials like E F one and W F. Morgan Miller: The toll came in October. Leide das Neves Ferreira, six years old, died on October twenty-third, of septicemia and generalized infection, at the Marcílio Dias Navy Hospital in Rio de Janeiro. Maria Gabriela Ferreira, thirty-seven, died the same day — the woman who had carried the poison to the hospital herself. Israel Batista dos Santos, twenty-two, one of Devair's employees, died on October twenty-seventh. Admilson Alves de Souza, eighteen, another of Devair's employees, died on October twenty-eighth. When the international medical team arrived in Goiânia, they found Leide confined to an isolated hospital room — because the hospital staff were afraid to go near her. She was buried in Goiânia in a special fiberglass coffin lined with lead. When news of the burial got out, more than two thousand people rioted at the cemetery, blocking the roads with stones and bricks — driven by fear, and by disinformation. Morgan Miller: In the panic, nearly a hundred and thirty thousand people flooded the local hospitals in the first days. About a hundred and twelve thousand were examined for contamination. Two hundred forty-nine were contaminated. One hundred twenty-nine had contamination inside their bodies. Twenty were hospitalized in Goiânia. Fourteen were transferred to Rio. Fourteen developed bone marrow failure. Eight showed the early phase of acute radiation syndrome. Twenty-eight suffered radiation burns, first to third degree. Fifty more were kept under close medical surveillance. Doctors treated the internal contamination with Prussian Blue, in doses of one and a half to ten grams a day. The accident was rated level five on the international new-clear event scale — an accident with wider consequences. Morgan Miller: Devair Alves Ferreira survived a dose of seven grays — a dose that should have killed him. He died in nineteen ninety-four, of cirrhosis, aggravated by depression and drinking. His brother Ivo died in two thousand three, of emphysema. The powder that had seemed like treasure left a long shadow over everyone it touched, even the ones it did not kill. Morgan Miller: The cleanup took years. Topsoil was stripped from several sites. Several houses were demolished. Everything inside those houses was seized and incinerated — and the international inspectors later noted that, to reduce the psychological damage, far more effort should have gone into cleaning items of personal value: jewelry, photographs, the small things people loved. Forty-two houses were contaminated. Fourteen cars. Three buses. Five pigs. Fifty thousand rolls of toilet paper. The waste was moved to remote storage. About forty-four terabecquerels of cesium were recovered during the cleanup. About seven terabecquerels were never accounted for. Morgan Miller: The reckoning took even longer. On March seventeenth, two thousand, the eighth federal court of Goiás ordered Brazil's national new-clear energy commission to pay one million reais, and to guarantee medical and psychological treatment for the direct and indirect victims — and their descendants, down to the third generation. The state civil servants' institute was fined a hundred thousand reais. One of the clinic's owners was fined a hundred thousand reais, for the abandoned state of the building. The clinic's physicist was fined a hundred thousand reais. And the two scavengers — Roberto and Wagner, the men who had pushed the source home in a wheelbarrow — were found directly responsible for the accident, but were never prosecuted. They had not known what they were handling. They had no criminal intent. And since no danger sign had ever been erected in the abandoned clinic, the court redirected the liability to the clinic itself. Morgan Miller: There is a quiet mercy in that verdict. The court looked at two men who had carried death home in a wheelbarrow and saw what they were: not criminals, but people failed by everyone above them. No sign on the door. No warning in the neighborhood. Nothing between a curious human being and fifty terabecquerels except a guard who did not show up on a Sunday morning. Morgan Miller: In February of nineteen eighty-eight, the state of Goiás established the Fundação Leide das Neves Ferreira — the Leide das Neves Ferreira Foundation — to study the contamination and to aid the affected. A study published in two thousand seven found that cesium-related disease rates among the survivors matched the general population. The compensation continues. And the survivors still report being treated as contaminated in their everyday lives — a prejudice that outlasted the radiation itself. Morgan Miller: This show has a rule: handle with care. Nobody who touched that powder deserves a cheap shot. There were no warning signs. No training, no public knowledge, nothing in Goiânia to tell a curious person that the most beautiful thing they had ever seen was also the most dangerous. The courts knew the source was sitting in that building. The clinic's owners wrote letters about it. The regulator was warned, in writing, about a cesium bomb. And for two years the keys changed hands in courtrooms while the machine waited in a half-demolished building — glowing, and waiting for someone curious enough to find it. Goiânia is still cited as the worst radiological accident in the Western Hemisphere. Blame the management. The people who touched the powder were failed by every institution that was supposed to keep them safe. Morgan Miller: I'm Morgan Miller, and this has been New-clear Shadows. Morgan Miller: A big thank-you to floof tags dot com for sponsoring the show. Morgan Miller: If you are enjoying New-clear Shadows, please follow or subscribe wherever you are listening. It helps others find the show. Morgan Miller: Visit our website, new-clear shadows pod dot com, for more information. Morgan Miller: One more thing before you go. Morgan Miller: This Sunday, October the twenty-fifth, this show does something it has never done. Fiction Under Investigation. A bonus episode examining a disaster that never happened: a radioactive fire in Hong Kong, an approaching storm, and officials who would rather keep seven million people in the dark. It is from the two thousand twenty-four film Cesium Fallout, starring Andy Lau. Morgan Miller: The film borrowed its glowing blue powder from a real accident — the one you have just heard. On Sunday, we find out what it got right, and what it got very, very wrong.