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My mother was a nurse at the Hospital Geral de Goiânia (HGG) at the time, that's where everyone involved in the incident like Leide das Neves and her family were first admited. She would often tell me how awful the whole situation was, with nurses and doctors freaking out about it because the source of radiation was not yet known and they knew the danger it posed for them and the population at large. Her and the staff still tended to the ill, despite all their worries and fears, as it is often the case with health workers. So cheers for all the health workers around! And my mom!
Radiation detectors must have been really hard to get ahold of back then. Someone authorized had to go to a ministry in order to borrow one. That's crazy! I'm glad that they are so cheap and more readily accessible nowadays.
@@lesliespeaker668 Thye were not so hard to get, just rare to find, very expensive to buy privatelly, and very few people knew about them. The doctor went to the ministry to get one immediatelly, for an emergency, because the alternative would have been chasing an University or hospital that could (and wanted to) lend him one
For sure. Any semi-intelligent person would say "OMFG, you're here bcuz of what sounds like radiation poisoning, but you don't know what caused it?!" I wouldn't want to be 100% callous, but if multiple ppl were showing up, I'd tell them ALL to leave hospital building ASAP, STRIP NAKED, walk away from clothes a good 50-100yds to diff side of building, THEN HOSE THEM down for 10-20min...Then they could be treated. 20min delay in treatment = no % diff in survival If they were exposed to HE gamma. It WOULD help to ensure hospital staff aren't exposed to the radiation source (IE in some poor fool's pocket), and their clothes are likely quite radioactive anyways...so you don't want to be anywhere near ANYTHING that can be 'disposed of'.... Crazy experience; up there with those that got exposed at Bhopal or that Russian Theatre hostage crisis (where Rus Gov used some fentanyl/nerve gas on hostage n criminals alike).
Was in my home town, my mother was pregnant with my older sister at the time. She lived far from the house where the accident happen, the bus she took to work went near the place, so she did got scared of having being exposed, but it wasn't the case. The passing of the kid Leide das Neves broke everyone's heart, she was burried in a lead coffin, my mother was than pregnant with a baby girl so she felt specially touched by that tragedy. Small correction: Goiânia is not a small town, in 1987 had 700 thousand habitants, while now has around 1.5 milion (without counting the metropolitan area). I know its small compared to São Paulo or New York, but it is still a big town and the capital city of a brazilian state (Goiás).
Yeah, even here in America, 700k to 1.5m population is DEFINITELY a proper city, if not a metro. Maybe it's smaller than major cities/metropolitan areas in America, but I mean, some of our cities have a LOT of population.
I grew up in Goiânia, and my mother was pregnant with me when the radioactive accident occurred. My parents remained calm. Both worked at the Federal University of Goiás-my father having done some study in radiology at the School of Veterinary Medicine, which gave him a solid understanding of radiation and its effects. However, a wave of misinformation swept the city, fueling widespread panic. When Maria Gabriela transported the radioactive source to the Health Surveillance Agency, she took the "Eixão," one of the busiest bus lines in the city. This sparked significant alarm, as regular passengers in that line feared potential contamination. Fortunately, my parents owned a car and mostly stayed on the university campus, which was (and still is) somewhat isolated from the city - a legacy of the military regime that placed new campuses far from urban centers to stifle student activism. My father did take the Eixão once a week to attend a class at the older campus downtown. Even so, he calculated that his trips didn’t align with Maria Gabriela’s, and the chances of having ridden the same bus were slim. So my parents avoided the frenzy. They chose not to participate in the decontamination efforts at the Olympic Stadium. They reasoned it was unlikely they had been exposed but considered waiting in line next to someone who possibly had been contaminated posed an unnecessary risk. My mother, who is originally from São Paulo, recalls how at the end of that year, during holidays with her family, cars with Goiânia license plates drew suspicion. My father’s thick accent would be met with wariness. And her pregnancy invited awkward questions -people wondered aloud if I might be born with malformations due to the radiation. I still joke about it sometimes. When relatives point out a flaw or quirk of mine, I blame it on the cesium.
i like how he didn't say "the unimaginable" or "the unthinkable." he said "the inevitable" because that's what this was, completely avoidable if they just heeded protocol and inevitable if they didn't
I've seen a few videos about this and each and every one makes me so sad and angry. Scary, scary stuff. The poor little girl who thought the glowing sparkles were so pretty...may she rest in peace.
@ladyrazorsharp reminds me of the radium girls who would cover their clothes and body with radioactive powder they used to paint watches with. They did it before dances or dates the went to after work. What happened to them in the end was pure horror. And they were brave enough to fight with lawmakers while the women were dying one after another.
@@Nat_BLSK Some would paint it on their teeth. They would also lick or suck on the paint brushes to keep them pointy while they painted the clock hands and other glow in the dark items. So sad, some of them lost their entire lower jaw, just disintegrated away.
@Nat_BLSK crazy story. Jaws dropping off and femurs snapping like twigs etc... I've got a few watches in my collection those poor girls had a hand in... the past right?
I almost didn’t watch this as I’ve seen it covered a few times before. I’m so glad I did. Excellent video with far more details than most videos. Thank you.
There are people in the west who think they pee out of their butt, or that you can get pregnant by oral or anal sex, some people are just ignorant, it doesn`t mean the entire society is uneducated or superstitious..
The thing about radioactive isotopes is that they have a very short useful life. Meaning that they are good for only so many shots and must be replaced. Sometimes in order to save money they are used beyond their useful life and the patient doesn't get the proper dosage. Doesn't mean they aren't dangerous.
This references radiation sources, not nuclear med injections. The sources are what provides the radiation for nuclear med doses. The medical doses have a very short half life.
Yup the iridium 192 sources in gamma ray projectors and cobalt 60 are in this category. Both have short half lives where they become zombie sources that are still dangerous but no longer useful as intended for several years.
6:57 TFW it only gets worse from here. That poor kid though. She was six years old. I think that might've been the age I asked what the little sign with the three triangles on the brick wall of my school was for. (It meant the building was the area's nuclear fallout shelter).
A 1990 film Caesium-137 -- The Nightmare of Goiana, a dramatisation of the incident, was made by Roberto Pires. It won several awards at the 1990 Festival de Brasilia. An episode of the Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Thine Own Self," was partially inspired by the accident.
There was another similar situation in South America that was only detected when a truck carrying radioactive steel for houses took a wrong turn and went past a radiation detector at a US nuclear site. That one was Cobalt60 IIRC because it was ferromagnetic and was included in a batch of steel at a smelter. A story on that would be good.
Yep, Cobalt-60 apparently from a dismantled radiotherapy unit in Ciudad Juárez which then went to a junkyard, sold to foundries, added into rebar, shipped, detected at Los Alamos. But oh gosh it really does get worse. The electromagnets used at the junkyard caused the cobalt-60 to spread to other machines and therefore into more metals. 🙀 Thousands of people were exposed, hundreds of houses had to be demolished, spanning over a dozen Mexico and US states. Fortuitous it was caught. Cleanup was a doozy, and I’m not sure all the metal was reclaimed. All that mess for a single machine that didn’t meet regulations. I’d love to watch a video on this.
Not so South America, it was in my hometown, Ciudad Juarez. And they have already covered the incident and Simon even mentions it at the end of the video th-cam.com/video/L_-vf8RBzuc/w-d-xo.htmlsi=9R-f_RAlqfnj5F8W
It's a good thing you mentioned that there have been other similar incidents, because i was getting the weirdest sense that I'd heard this story before, just with slightly different details. It's very depressing, though not surprising, that it's happened more than once.
The play by play on this is absolutely excruciating. Just when you think it can't possibly get worse, it gets worse. Over and over. I am already familiar with this incident and it curdles my blood with every retelling.
Moral of the story: If it says "laboratory", don't mess with it Also, if it's glowing, don't mess with it And you probably shouldn't be a doctor if you think leaving a radioactive object out in the open in a courtyard is the best idea This is why education is important
And if you close your hospital, remove the nuclear med machines! A lot of people failed to practice common sense long before the scavengers got there. 😢
I'm Spanish and I've had to search about the Cadiz incident because I didn't remember something happening there. Now I see it, we call it the "Acerinox accident". A Cs-137 source that scrambled in a batch of scrap metal and was melted. The detectors inside the reprocessing plant did not work.
Ironically this would be the extra dose of the same information that becomes poisonous with symptoms including this confusion 😵💫 .. and acute Mandela effect infection. This story happened 3 times or twice in 2 places.. idk if a little kid was playing with it or if it was in a scrap yard 😂
Most deaths due to radiation exposure does not come from disasters at nuclear power plants or weapon detonations. It comes from incompetence or neglect when handling powerful calibration sources or when disposing of old radiotherapy equipment.
Hi Simon, I love these videos but must say I find the background music very distr (hey look a squirrel!) acting. If there was alternative track without the music I would definitely choose to listen to that. Not a deal breaker, keep up the great work!
@@chrisbentleywalkingandrambling I went digging and it turns out Simon covered a similar situation happened in Mexico. The beginning is very similar. That's probably what we were thinking of.
@UnicornsPoopRainbows it just showed the lack of universal knowledge around warning symbols. I'm sure if they were aware, they probably wouldn't have done it. Sad story.
it's genuniely important to the history of this that every children's cartoon in the following decade in the united states and Canada in the 1990s had ooze accidently falling out of machines on to people and animals and plants, making them super heroes or advanced beings.
23:29 I don't know about Taiwan and Ciudad Juárez, but the one from Cádiz was not like this one or the Vietnam one you touched at Into the Shadows: it was not a poor scrap scavenger getting ahold of an incorrectly disposed of machine and failing to identify the meaning of the trefoil, but an automatized scrap junkyard/melting plant (a metal recycling plant belonging to an enterprise called Acerinox that's a major producer of stainless steel) failing twice in a row to detect the radioactive material (once at the monitoring equipment leading to the melting crucible and once again at the chimneys venting the fumes out, both of which had radioactive detectors that malfunctioned).
This is what kills me. Where I live, I run into people who tie themselves into knows about the nuclear power plants near us, and to an extent I can understand this, but I have difficulty agreeing when incidents like this (I also watch a couple of technical channels on sismilar topics) are responsible for far more eposure, not to mention the absolute constant toll that carbon fuel are taking on the environment and populations around the world. After Chernobel, people are aware they have to be hypervigilent (appropriately in these cases) of safetywith nuclear power plants, but these highly radioactive, medical and industrial sources are unbelievably cavalierly handled and can be spread to very large numbers of people and affect the environment as well, just not as dramatically.
I think that, as a consequence of that incident, we had to learn some symbols in school, like the radioactive one, biohazard etc. I was a child in the 80's, I have no idea if that's something they teach in school anymore.
Did I miss it, or did Simon not explain what "Drop and Run" was? While it's related to Cobalt-60 and not the Cesium (IIRC) the story focuses on, it's in the title, and frankly, kinda cool.
"Drop and Run" is a warning label often attached to, or engraved into, highly radioactive sources. I have seen this warning on a source capsule of Cobalt-60. The particular picture that's most popular contains 3540 Ci of Co-60, which is about 2.5x the total activity of the Cs-137 at issue here. Also caused by the accident was the development of the ISO 21482 sign, which conveys the "Drop an Run" message in an internationally legible manner.
He did, that one was in context to the incident in Thailand, one also precipitated by improperly secured material found by poor scrappers trying to make a living. That one was a Seimens machine if I recall correctly with a cobalt 60 rod
If you stand there holding the thing that says "Drop and Run" and wondering what is going on you're really missing the point and extreme urgency of the message.
@@JeffBilkins If You can read. If You know what radioactivity is. If, if, if, if... The guys who broke into the machine were quite poor, with very little to no education. They didn't have a clue about what all that thing was about.
This happened in my city. My mom worked as a banking clerk not far from where their victims's junkyard was, she was pregnant with me at the time and was terrified that she had somehow gotten irradiated. Back then the average person didn't know jack shit about these kinds of radiological incidents or how radiation could affect someone, they still don't. So the panic was generalized.
"The dose makes the poison" is true, until you consider the fact that there are some substances which will *never* exhibit desirable effects within the body at any amount/dose while largely being detrimental. I think we can say such things are ACTUALLY "true" poison.
You’re missing the point it seems but I can see what you are trying to get at. This is not meant to be a general principle and not an absolute rule. Gamma rays are never good for us at all, but at specific doses they can be utilized to kill cancer cells while minimizing the damage to surrounding tissues. Ricin, cyanide and Botox are also always poisonous with just a minute amount but, as the saying goes, it is the amount of exposure that determines the toxicity. For things like water and oxygen; too much is toxic also. But there are some substances that we have no use for that are too dangerous and toxic/poisonous such palytoxin and dioxin but that is not what Paracelsus was getting at.
@ correct, thanks for posting clarification. i understand the point of the saying, its just the way some people use it with no mention of the fact that there are some particles and/or substances that will never be useful in any regard to the body or its maintenance that makes me comment.
i know its a lot to ask and i can easily search this names of the videos you mention, but it would be nice if you linked said videos in the description.
For a known hard gamma ray source only massive amounts of dense material offers protection as effective as just being far from it. For uncontained sources with an unknown distribution and unknown existence there's no escape.
22:50 The story of how to label and warn people hundreds, if not thousands, of years in our future about the danger of radioactive material is rather interesting. TIFO might have done it, I'm not sure.
It almost happened again. I was living in Divinopolis MG when I saw on TV that the goverment was offering a reward for a stolen car because there was Cesium on the truck.
The most insane detail of our own Roswell incident was the Air Force trying to gaslight us into believing that the body bags transporting the corpses of the alleged extra-terrestrials were in fact two midget women who were, for some unexplainable reason, brought into the Brazilian Air Force (in body bags???) base near Varginha to give birth to their babies.
Amazing and scary. Often bureaucracy fails spectacularly. As a one time scrapper, I can see this happening anywhere. Let's not be too comfortable, no matter where we live.
for those curious why they were transfered to a naval hospital in rio de janeiro, its because the navy from rio was the one responsible for developing brazil nuclear energy program, so they were specialists in the subject
You know the situation is bad when Simon keeps saying to check out the other videos for more info on how damaging and or harmful things are to us humans within the current video . 😮
1:05 I'mma let you finish, but that radioactive material wasn't *_stolen._* The site was abandoned. Yes, it was opportunistic salvage, but it wasn't their fault that the clinic that shut down didn't follow anything resembling proper protocols for disposal of their former property.
And the locals are so ignorant they turned one of the places where it happened into a parking lot. I should know it, I have to walk by that street constantly
Poor child. With radiotion posioning that bad not even morphine can help with the pain, and with everyone being to scared to go near her, it means the 6 year old girl died scared in massive pain and alone with no idea what was going on. 😢
Why dont you link the videos you talk about in the video? Its kind of annoying to try to do a back and forth between the video and the search bar to find a video you mention in these videos.
It's easy to wonder how good a job they're doing decontaminating. it's still amazing to know that we can do such stuff. These people had no clue, and someone came in and took care of it in a way they never could have imagined. Nice to see the government doing something totally necessary and hopefully enough.
ha, in brazil ? my guy, they let people come back to the contaminated dust city after the dam with mercury and heavy metals broke a few years ago...everyone in there will suffer from birth defect and poisoning in the years to come from inhaling that toxic dust. brazil governament has always been useless,unless its to take the money from people. they have the most efficient IRS in the world.
I’m sorry this is just absolutely baffling to me. That people would think that some mysterious glowing substance was not potentially dangerous and would smear it on their bodies and contaminate their food with it. I mean what the actual f.
im of the mindset the air glow is the true cause of the sky being blue during the day as the air and magnetosphere block the more hazardous solar radiation. makes far far more sense than the prism effect taught in schools, unless you had my old school chemistry teacher that is. if it were the prism effect we would get far more variation in color through the day and a change as we look closer to the sun, instead no its just all glowing blue except during sunrise and sunset where prismatic effect does overpower and combine with the blue glow to make the reds, pinks, orange, and purples you see at sunset with the blue acting as a projector screen to make the prism colors visible. once its over the horizon all that fades to zero because the earth has blocked the atmosphere getting any direct rays.
7:45: Uh oh, blue glow (rhyme unintentional). The saying is that Cherenkov radiation (...that's actually in water I think) won't kill you... but it indicates the presence of something that will. 8:45: First some background: Green glow is usually associated with phosphorescence ('glow in the dark'), and once upon a time phosphorescent paint would be combined with a low-level radium source to make it glow in the dark without first having to 'charge' it in sunlight. This is where the association comes from. But that wasn't what was asked. To my knowledge there are no naturally occurring radioactive substances that glow green, nor can I find anything obvious I might have missed with a quick search. It is theoretically possible to set up a scenario where one will do that, possibly as a safety feature, such as by coating it with phosphorescent paint (see above), or possibly by using the right fluid surrounding it to create longer-wavelength Cherenkov radiation. It's not going to happen without some sort of human intervention like that though, at least on Earth.
The blue glow is from autoscintillation and ionization of the air similar to corona discharge the color is a deep blue violet. Dont hold strange metal things that have a dim erie blue violet glow, but if you do.. Drop and run 😮😳💩
Just so you all can stop complaining about Simon already making a video about this.... HE HASN'T... FIGURE IT OUT!! If I'm mistaken...provide your receipt and let me know the name of the video and the channel so I can find it.
I never heard of this tragedy before… Really liked the content of the video, and I’m really sorry but I flinch each time Simon assassinates the Portuguese language… I had to rewind several parts to understand what he was saying… I’m really sorry for my itch, I love your work, guys… ✌️
I am curious, how much it'd help survival % IF they quickly did a 100% blood replacement like 2-5x. Like replace 1st time, let hour go by (so blood can build up more radioactive debris from solid tissues), repeat a 2nd time etc. While you're at it, multiple enemas until you're 'truly empty'... THEN over-hydrate them as much as possible: diuretics (to make you pee constantly), maybe even bypass the kidneys (to prevent damage), and just drain fluids before they reach kidneys/pancreas...THEN KEEP putting new fluids in them at as high a rate as possible w/o causing "drowning in own fluids". You'd need to put antibiotics, vitamins, etc in the fluids.
11 years to figure out i had been exposed to extreme numbers of raccoon roundworm and survived, still living with thousands in my body. still being jerked around by doctors.
Someone should call American Heritage Dictionary. Cambridge Dictionary. Century Dictionary. Collins English Dictionary. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. And Macmillan, to let them know Webster already defined idiot 🙄
was none of this stuff marked with a skull and crossbones or a radioactive symbol? oh at the end it says they were all marked but the people who took it didn't know what the symbols meant
No. it wasn't marked with the skull and crossbones. It was marked with the radiation symbol. Nut the people who found it were uneducated, so it didn't have any meaning to them.
In the TUBE containing radioactive substance probably a PRINTED RADIOACTIVE SYMBOL, is a good way, OTHERWISE IF A PERSON NOT RECOGNIZE THIS SYMBOL... OMG
This video brought to you in part by our Patrons over on Patreon. If you’d like to support our efforts here directly, and our continued efforts to improve our videos, as well as do more ultra in-depth long form videos that built in ads and even sponsors don’t always cover fully, check out our Patreon page and perks here: www.patreon.com/TodayIFoundOut And as ever, thanks for watching!
I know I watched the videos you referenced in this one... but... is there no links? Or am I dumb? I'm sometimes dumb 🫤
My mother was a nurse at the Hospital Geral de Goiânia (HGG) at the time, that's where everyone involved in the incident like Leide das Neves and her family were first admited. She would often tell me how awful the whole situation was, with nurses and doctors freaking out about it because the source of radiation was not yet known and they knew the danger it posed for them and the population at large. Her and the staff still tended to the ill, despite all their worries and fears, as it is often the case with health workers. So cheers for all the health workers around! And my mom!
Radiation detectors must have been really hard to get ahold of back then. Someone authorized had to go to a ministry in order to borrow one. That's crazy!
I'm glad that they are so cheap and more readily accessible nowadays.
@@lesliespeaker668 Thye were not so hard to get, just rare to find, very expensive to buy privatelly, and very few people knew about them.
The doctor went to the ministry to get one immediatelly, for an emergency, because the alternative would have been chasing an University or hospital that could (and wanted to) lend him one
For sure. Any semi-intelligent person would say "OMFG, you're here bcuz of what sounds like radiation poisoning, but you don't know what caused it?!" I wouldn't want to be 100% callous, but if multiple ppl were showing up, I'd tell them ALL to leave hospital building ASAP, STRIP NAKED, walk away from clothes a good 50-100yds to diff side of building, THEN HOSE THEM down for 10-20min...Then they could be treated.
20min delay in treatment = no % diff in survival If they were exposed to HE gamma. It WOULD help to ensure hospital staff aren't exposed to the radiation source (IE in some poor fool's pocket), and their clothes are likely quite radioactive anyways...so you don't want to be anywhere near ANYTHING that can be 'disposed of'....
Crazy experience; up there with those that got exposed at Bhopal or that Russian Theatre hostage crisis (where Rus Gov used some fentanyl/nerve gas on hostage n criminals alike).
*_Thor & Fact Boy collab, when?_*
Was in my home town, my mother was pregnant with my older sister at the time.
She lived far from the house where the accident happen, the bus she took to work went near the place, so she did got scared of having being exposed, but it wasn't the case.
The passing of the kid Leide das Neves broke everyone's heart, she was burried in a lead coffin, my mother was than pregnant with a baby girl so she felt specially touched by that tragedy.
Small correction: Goiânia is not a small town, in 1987 had 700 thousand habitants, while now has around 1.5 milion (without counting the metropolitan area). I know its small compared to São Paulo or New York, but it is still a big town and the capital city of a brazilian state (Goiás).
Yeah, even here in America, 700k to 1.5m population is DEFINITELY a proper city, if not a metro. Maybe it's smaller than major cities/metropolitan areas in America, but I mean, some of our cities have a LOT of population.
Bigger than any city in my US state.
That's city sized or large town in the UK
@EShirako I did a little research and 1.5 million ppl is the same as Phoenix, which is the largest U.S. capital city
I grew up in Goiânia, and my mother was pregnant with me when the radioactive accident occurred. My parents remained calm. Both worked at the Federal University of Goiás-my father having done some study in radiology at the School of Veterinary Medicine, which gave him a solid understanding of radiation and its effects.
However, a wave of misinformation swept the city, fueling widespread panic. When Maria Gabriela transported the radioactive source to the Health Surveillance Agency, she took the "Eixão," one of the busiest bus lines in the city. This sparked significant alarm, as regular passengers in that line feared potential contamination.
Fortunately, my parents owned a car and mostly stayed on the university campus, which was (and still is) somewhat isolated from the city - a legacy of the military regime that placed new campuses far from urban centers to stifle student activism. My father did take the Eixão once a week to attend a class at the older campus downtown. Even so, he calculated that his trips didn’t align with Maria Gabriela’s, and the chances of having ridden the same bus were slim. So my parents avoided the frenzy. They chose not to participate in the decontamination efforts at the Olympic Stadium. They reasoned it was unlikely they had been exposed but considered waiting in line next to someone who possibly had been contaminated posed an unnecessary risk.
My mother, who is originally from São Paulo, recalls how at the end of that year, during holidays with her family, cars with Goiânia license plates drew suspicion. My father’s thick accent would be met with wariness. And her pregnancy invited awkward questions -people wondered aloud if I might be born with malformations due to the radiation. I still joke about it sometimes. When relatives point out a flaw or quirk of mine, I blame it on the cesium.
i like how he didn't say "the unimaginable" or "the unthinkable." he said "the inevitable" because that's what this was, completely avoidable if they just heeded protocol and inevitable if they didn't
Simon, "I'll bet you can't write a script referencing a half dozen previous videos."
Gilles, "Hold my beer."
Files wrote 500+ scripts at this point. I'm sure he has everything indexed.
Where are these videos? Seriously? I'm looking but don't see them.😢
@@geniferteal4178 They never are
@@SEAZNDragonif Files was a typo for Gilles, it's a proper term because he definitely has FILES of scripts that he referenced 😂😅😅😅😂
@@henotic.essence damn just noticed but yeah I’m sure Giles has a filing cabinet of his old scripts to look back on.
I'm from Goiânia, I'm a Physician and worked at the Fire Dept now with the Genetic team that unveiled all the alterations that followed the accident.
I've seen a few videos about this and each and every one makes me so sad and angry. Scary, scary stuff. The poor little girl who thought the glowing sparkles were so pretty...may she rest in peace.
Even today most people wouldn't even think about radiation problems while pulling scrap metal.
I pray for the little lamb's soul ❤
@ladyrazorsharp reminds me of the radium girls who would cover their clothes and body with radioactive powder they used to paint watches with. They did it before dances or dates the went to after work. What happened to them in the end was pure horror. And they were brave enough to fight with lawmakers while the women were dying one after another.
@@Nat_BLSK Some would paint it on their teeth. They would also lick or suck on the paint brushes to keep them pointy while they painted the clock hands and other glow in the dark items. So sad, some of them lost their entire lower jaw, just disintegrated away.
@Nat_BLSK crazy story. Jaws dropping off and femurs snapping like twigs etc... I've got a few watches in my collection those poor girls had a hand in... the past right?
I almost didn’t watch this as I’ve seen it covered a few times before. I’m so glad I did. Excellent video with far more details than most videos. Thank you.
I was familiar with this event but not to this level of detail. Thank you for sharing!
In a society that doesn't know radiation, the core would've been though to be some kind of evil magic
Good luck charm
Imagine all the weird explanations we'd find for things we didn't understand? We might even create a religion around it.😮😊
@@geniferteal4178 Fallout has some of them :)
There are people in the west who think they pee out of their butt, or that you can get pregnant by oral or anal sex, some people are just ignorant, it doesn`t mean the entire society is uneducated or superstitious..
@@geniferteal4178 Some might even be part of those religions despite science having progressed a tiny bit the last 2000 years..
The thing about radioactive isotopes is that they have a very short useful life. Meaning that they are good for only so many shots and must be replaced. Sometimes in order to save money they are used beyond their useful life and the patient doesn't get the proper dosage. Doesn't mean they aren't dangerous.
This references radiation sources, not nuclear med injections. The sources are what provides the radiation for nuclear med doses. The medical doses have a very short half life.
Yup the iridium 192 sources in gamma ray projectors and cobalt 60 are in this category. Both have short half lives where they become zombie sources that are still dangerous but no longer useful as intended for several years.
happy new year simon! aka factboy. this was a good video to build on what i knew about this
6:57 TFW it only gets worse from here.
That poor kid though. She was six years old. I think that might've been the age I asked what the little sign with the three triangles on the brick wall of my school was for. (It meant the building was the area's nuclear fallout shelter).
It highlights how dangerous a combination of poverty and lack of education really is.
A 1990 film Caesium-137 -- The Nightmare of Goiana, a dramatisation of the incident, was made by Roberto Pires. It won several awards at the 1990 Festival de Brasilia. An episode of the Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Thine Own Self," was partially inspired by the accident.
Season 7 episode 16 for those who like to rewatch it. Which is what I am going to do now. Always looking for an excuse to watch some TNG.
There was another similar situation in South America that was only detected when a truck carrying radioactive steel for houses took a wrong turn and went past a radiation detector at a US nuclear site. That one was Cobalt60 IIRC because it was ferromagnetic and was included in a batch of steel at a smelter. A story on that would be good.
Yep, Cobalt-60 apparently from a dismantled radiotherapy unit in Ciudad Juárez which then went to a junkyard, sold to foundries, added into rebar, shipped, detected at Los Alamos. But oh gosh it really does get worse. The electromagnets used at the junkyard caused the cobalt-60 to spread to other machines and therefore into more metals. 🙀
Thousands of people were exposed, hundreds of houses had to be demolished, spanning over a dozen Mexico and US states. Fortuitous it was caught. Cleanup was a doozy, and I’m not sure all the metal was reclaimed. All that mess for a single machine that didn’t meet regulations. I’d love to watch a video on this.
Not so South America, it was in my hometown, Ciudad Juarez. And they have already covered the incident and Simon even mentions it at the end of the video th-cam.com/video/L_-vf8RBzuc/w-d-xo.htmlsi=9R-f_RAlqfnj5F8W
It's a good thing you mentioned that there have been other similar incidents, because i was getting the weirdest sense that I'd heard this story before, just with slightly different details. It's very depressing, though not surprising, that it's happened more than once.
Thanks!
No thank you! :-)
The way people treated the cesium like a magical gem says a lot about human nature. We're drawn to things that glow, even if they might be dangerous.
That's why when I see something glowing, I go the other way. I'm not getting trapped by any faeries.
The play by play on this is absolutely excruciating. Just when you think it can't possibly get worse, it gets worse. Over and over. I am already familiar with this incident and it curdles my blood with every retelling.
As usual, well researched and explained quite clearly and entertainingly.
Kyle Hill did an excellent video about this particular incident.
kyle hill the creep 😂
So did Brew. I think Brews was actually the best version, imo...
Kyle hill is a jerk and rude to people.
Kyle gets off on listening to the sound of his own voice which is annoying AF (imo)
@@zappulla4092was he a jerk and rude to you?
This event fascinated me as a child, and now it's just sad and infuriating.
Moral of the story:
If it says "laboratory", don't mess with it
Also, if it's glowing, don't mess with it
And you probably shouldn't be a doctor if you think leaving a radioactive object out in the open in a courtyard is the best idea
This is why education is important
And if you close your hospital, remove the nuclear med machines! A lot of people failed to practice common sense long before the scavengers got there. 😢
I gasped in horror about every 10 seconds throughout this video. Thanks for researching, compiling and sharing.
Your way of speaking is amazing im always to taken in to the story thank you :)
Simon’s ability and pure talent of pronunciation is *chef’s kiss*! A linguist Master. 😊❤
Yes, except for app-at-ure
I'm Spanish and I've had to search about the Cadiz incident because I didn't remember something happening there. Now I see it, we call it the "Acerinox accident". A Cs-137 source that scrambled in a batch of scrap metal and was melted. The detectors inside the reprocessing plant did not work.
I swear there's another Whistlerverse video about this incident.
Yes! Isn't it like Into the Shadows "Cobalt 60: Drop and Run" or something?
Seems like there's at least 2.
@@ImmortalKat4everthat takes place in vietnam…
Ironically this would be the extra dose of the same information that becomes poisonous with symptoms including this confusion 😵💫 .. and acute Mandela effect infection. This story happened 3 times or twice in 2 places.. idk if a little kid was playing with it or if it was in a scrap yard 😂
Thoughty two.
Most deaths due to radiation exposure does not come from disasters at nuclear power plants or weapon detonations. It comes from incompetence or neglect when handling powerful calibration sources or when disposing of old radiotherapy equipment.
Hi Simon, I love these videos but must say I find the background music very distr (hey look a squirrel!) acting. If there was alternative track without the music I would definitely choose to listen to that. Not a deal breaker, keep up the great work!
I thought you had covered this one already? Still an enjoyable watch.
Definitely did on a different channel
@UnicornsPoopRainbows I thought so, but not 100% certain. Thanks for the clarification.
@@chrisbentleywalkingandrambling I went digging and it turns out Simon covered a similar situation happened in Mexico. The beginning is very similar. That's probably what we were thinking of.
@UnicornsPoopRainbows it just showed the lack of universal knowledge around warning symbols. I'm sure if they were aware, they probably wouldn't have done it. Sad story.
Horrific incident indeed, Many videos exist already over it. But a video with other nuances is always welcome
it's genuniely important to the history of this that every children's cartoon in the following decade in the united states and Canada in the 1990s had ooze accidently falling out of machines on to people and animals and plants, making them super heroes or advanced beings.
I remember that incident being reported in the US. It was given only very slight coverage without any details at all
I love it when simon makes videos he's already made before on a different channel
What channel
23:29 I don't know about Taiwan and Ciudad Juárez, but the one from Cádiz was not like this one or the Vietnam one you touched at Into the Shadows: it was not a poor scrap scavenger getting ahold of an incorrectly disposed of machine and failing to identify the meaning of the trefoil, but an automatized scrap junkyard/melting plant (a metal recycling plant belonging to an enterprise called Acerinox that's a major producer of stainless steel) failing twice in a row to detect the radioactive material (once at the monitoring equipment leading to the melting crucible and once again at the chimneys venting the fumes out, both of which had radioactive detectors that malfunctioned).
This is what kills me. Where I live, I run into people who tie themselves into knows about the nuclear power plants near us, and to an extent I can understand this, but I have difficulty agreeing when incidents like this (I also watch a couple of technical channels on sismilar topics) are responsible for far more eposure, not to mention the absolute constant toll that carbon fuel are taking on the environment and populations around the world. After Chernobel, people are aware they have to be hypervigilent (appropriately in these cases) of safetywith nuclear power plants, but these highly radioactive, medical and industrial sources are unbelievably cavalierly handled and can be spread to very large numbers of people and affect the environment as well, just not as dramatically.
I think that, as a consequence of that incident, we had to learn some symbols in school, like the radioactive one, biohazard etc. I was a child in the 80's, I have no idea if that's something they teach in school anymore.
Extremely unlikely.
@ I’m from Brazil, and that stuff was on TV all the time back then.
I learned about it in the 2000s, we had a class dedicated to the incident in both middle and high school.
Did I miss it, or did Simon not explain what "Drop and Run" was? While it's related to Cobalt-60 and not the Cesium (IIRC) the story focuses on, it's in the title, and frankly, kinda cool.
"Drop and Run" is a warning label often attached to, or engraved into, highly radioactive sources. I have seen this warning on a source capsule of Cobalt-60. The particular picture that's most popular contains 3540 Ci of Co-60, which is about 2.5x the total activity of the Cs-137 at issue here. Also caused by the accident was the development of the ISO 21482 sign, which conveys the "Drop an Run" message in an internationally legible manner.
He did, that one was in context to the incident in Thailand, one also precipitated by improperly secured material found by poor scrappers trying to make a living. That one was a Seimens machine if I recall correctly with a cobalt 60 rod
If you stand there holding the thing that says "Drop and Run" and wondering what is going on you're really missing the point and extreme urgency of the message.
@@JeffBilkins If You can read. If You know what radioactivity is. If, if, if, if...
The guys who broke into the machine were quite poor, with very little to no education. They didn't have a clue about what all that thing was about.
@@sysbofh let alone tha fact that "Drop and Run" is in english, not portuguese. Even if they could read (IDK for sure) it would mean nothing to them.
This happened in my city. My mom worked as a banking clerk not far from where their victims's junkyard was, she was pregnant with me at the time and was terrified that she had somehow gotten irradiated. Back then the average person didn't know jack shit about these kinds of radiological incidents or how radiation could affect someone, they still don't. So the panic was generalized.
6:58 oh, it’s already lit.
That's pretty funny
"The dose makes the poison" is true, until you consider the fact that there are some substances which will *never* exhibit desirable effects within the body at any amount/dose while largely being detrimental. I think we can say such things are ACTUALLY "true" poison.
You’re missing the point it seems but I can see what you are trying to get at. This is not meant to be a general principle and not an absolute rule.
Gamma rays are never good for us at all, but at specific doses they can be utilized to kill cancer cells while minimizing the damage to surrounding tissues.
Ricin, cyanide and Botox are also always poisonous with just a minute amount but, as the saying goes, it is the amount of exposure that determines the toxicity.
For things like water and oxygen; too much is toxic also. But there are some substances that we have no use for that are too dangerous and toxic/poisonous such palytoxin and dioxin but that is not what Paracelsus was getting at.
@ correct, thanks for posting clarification. i understand the point of the saying, its just the way some people use it with no mention of the fact that there are some particles and/or substances that will never be useful in any regard to the body or its maintenance that makes me comment.
I worked at a scrapyard and this incident is why we had Geiger counters in multiple positions as you drive in.
Poor little girl 😢
i know its a lot to ask and i can easily search this names of the videos you mention, but it would be nice if you linked said videos in the description.
This was a serious incident but I laughed out loud at the 5:26 picture
Amazing video! Please cover more Brazilian history!
For a known hard gamma ray source only massive amounts of dense material offers protection as effective as just being far from it. For uncontained sources with an unknown distribution and unknown existence there's no escape.
22:50 The story of how to label and warn people hundreds, if not thousands, of years in our future about the danger of radioactive material is rather interesting. TIFO might have done it, I'm not sure.
It almost happened again. I was living in Divinopolis MG when I saw on TV that the goverment was offering a reward for a stolen car because there was Cesium on the truck.
Brazil has it's own Chernobyl, Roswell and many unique stories.
The most insane detail of our own Roswell incident was the Air Force trying to gaslight us into believing that the body bags transporting the corpses of the alleged extra-terrestrials were in fact two midget women who were, for some unexplainable reason, brought into the Brazilian Air Force (in body bags???) base near Varginha to give birth to their babies.
Brazil also has the highest HIV infection rate outside of Africa.
would be nice to actually have a LINK to all the mentioned videos...
"Mysterious 'glowing' substance" post-1945 = GET FAR AWAY...Its not supposed to be doing that.
Gandalf: "RUN, RUN YOU FOOLS!!!!"
Amazing and scary. Often bureaucracy fails spectacularly. As a one time scrapper, I can see this happening anywhere. Let's not be too comfortable, no matter where we live.
I watched Thoughty2 do this story just a few weeks ago.
Bizarre and tragic.
for those curious why they were transfered to a naval hospital in rio de janeiro, its because the navy from rio was the one responsible for developing brazil nuclear energy program, so they were specialists in the subject
You mentioned the previous video about different radioactive situations.But I don't see any of them.😢
You know the situation is bad when Simon keeps saying to check out the other videos for more info on how damaging and or harmful things are to us humans within the current video . 😮
What an incredible yet sad story.
Great episode. I'd like to see one on ebola.
1:05 I'mma let you finish, but that radioactive material wasn't *_stolen._* The site was abandoned.
Yes, it was opportunistic salvage, but it wasn't their fault that the clinic that shut down didn't follow anything resembling proper protocols for disposal of their former property.
This is one of the worst incidents of nuclear contamination that the world has ever seen.
And the locals are so ignorant they turned one of the places where it happened into a parking lot. I should know it, I have to walk by that street constantly
That's Goiânia for you
I am excited to see the difference between Simon’s documentary style and Kyle Hills.
I knew this video seemed familiar at first 😂😂
Poor child. With radiotion posioning that bad not even morphine can help with the pain, and with everyone being to scared to go near her, it means the 6 year old girl died scared in massive pain and alone with no idea what was going on. 😢
Why dont you link the videos you talk about in the video? Its kind of annoying to try to do a back and forth between the video and the search bar to find a video you mention in these videos.
Thank goodness for education
It's easy to wonder how good a job they're doing decontaminating. it's still amazing to know that we can do such stuff. These people had no clue, and someone came in and took care of it in a way they never could have imagined. Nice to see the government doing something totally necessary and hopefully enough.
ha, in brazil ? my guy, they let people come back to the contaminated dust city after the dam with mercury and heavy metals broke a few years ago...everyone in there will suffer from birth defect and poisoning in the years to come from inhaling that toxic dust.
brazil governament has always been useless,unless its to take the money from people. they have the most efficient IRS in the world.
Haza Oakridge TN!
I probably said, "OH. MY. GOD." eleventy times as events in the video unfolded.
I’m sorry this is just absolutely baffling to me. That people would think that some mysterious glowing substance was not potentially dangerous and would smear it on their bodies and contaminate their food with it. I mean what the actual f.
I feel like you covered this incident somewhere else, maybe Into the Shadows, or even Casual Criminalist?
Check band name "Real Life" from Goiania has already made a song (album) about this incident
22:42 *There are efforts being made to warn the future of radioactive waste even if our civilization is forgotten.*
I just kept thinking, " this is why we can't have nice things"
*_Thor & Fact Boy collab, when?_*
Radiation incidents in the public are very scary, like some invisible death aura from a fantasy setting.
Gamma irradiation??? Holy dooly thats some deep cell damage right there.
Damned that diahorrea!!!
I wonder if the episode "Thine Own Self" of Star Trek TNG was inspired by this incident.
this would NEVER happened if scrap yards owners in brazil didnt buy clearly stolen objects. they still do this to this day. its bound to happen again.
im of the mindset the air glow is the true cause of the sky being blue during the day as the air and magnetosphere block the more hazardous solar radiation. makes far far more sense than the prism effect taught in schools, unless you had my old school chemistry teacher that is. if it were the prism effect we would get far more variation in color through the day and a change as we look closer to the sun, instead no its just all glowing blue except during sunrise and sunset where prismatic effect does overpower and combine with the blue glow to make the reds, pinks, orange, and purples you see at sunset with the blue acting as a projector screen to make the prism colors visible. once its over the horizon all that fades to zero because the earth has blocked the atmosphere getting any direct rays.
The worst part of this tragedy is no one got to be the Hulk. They just died.
7:45: Uh oh, blue glow (rhyme unintentional). The saying is that Cherenkov radiation (...that's actually in water I think) won't kill you... but it indicates the presence of something that will.
8:45: First some background: Green glow is usually associated with phosphorescence ('glow in the dark'), and once upon a time phosphorescent paint would be combined with a low-level radium source to make it glow in the dark without first having to 'charge' it in sunlight. This is where the association comes from.
But that wasn't what was asked. To my knowledge there are no naturally occurring radioactive substances that glow green, nor can I find anything obvious I might have missed with a quick search. It is theoretically possible to set up a scenario where one will do that, possibly as a safety feature, such as by coating it with phosphorescent paint (see above), or possibly by using the right fluid surrounding it to create longer-wavelength Cherenkov radiation. It's not going to happen without some sort of human intervention like that though, at least on Earth.
17:44 that’s a pop up table worth a sheet.
The blue glow is from autoscintillation and ionization of the air similar to corona discharge the color is a deep blue violet. Dont hold strange metal things that have a dim erie blue violet glow, but if you do.. Drop and run 😮😳💩
Just so you all can stop complaining about Simon already making a video about this.... HE HASN'T... FIGURE IT OUT!! If I'm mistaken...provide your receipt and let me know the name of the video and the channel so I can find it.
I never heard of this tragedy before…
Really liked the content of the video, and I’m really sorry but I flinch each time Simon assassinates the Portuguese language…
I had to rewind several parts to understand what he was saying…
I’m really sorry for my itch, I love your work, guys… ✌️
I am curious, how much it'd help survival % IF they quickly did a 100% blood replacement like 2-5x. Like replace 1st time, let hour go by (so blood can build up more radioactive debris from solid tissues), repeat a 2nd time etc.
While you're at it, multiple enemas until you're 'truly empty'...
THEN over-hydrate them as much as possible: diuretics (to make you pee constantly), maybe even bypass the kidneys (to prevent damage), and just drain fluids before they reach kidneys/pancreas...THEN KEEP putting new fluids in them at as high a rate as possible w/o causing "drowning in own fluids". You'd need to put antibiotics, vitamins, etc in the fluids.
11 years to figure out i had been exposed to extreme numbers of raccoon roundworm and survived, still living with thousands in my body. still being jerked around by doctors.
Simon rocks!
How many channels are going to redo this story I mean it's like beating a dead horse
So don't watch? Lol wtf. Go tougrh some grass my dude.
So only one newspaper can cover a story? Or only one channel can cover the world cup or olympics?? Good to know
Someone should call American Heritage Dictionary.
Cambridge Dictionary.
Century Dictionary.
Collins English Dictionary.
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. And
Macmillan, to let them know Webster already defined idiot 🙄
14:13 yahaha you found me!
was none of this stuff marked with a skull and crossbones or a radioactive symbol? oh at the end it says they were all marked but the people who took it didn't know what the symbols meant
I always thought the skull was kind of self-explanatory 🤷
Maybe it's just me
No. it wasn't marked with the skull and crossbones. It was marked with the radiation symbol. Nut the people who found it were uneducated, so it didn't have any meaning to them.
In the TUBE containing radioactive substance probably a PRINTED RADIOACTIVE SYMBOL, is a good way, OTHERWISE IF A PERSON NOT RECOGNIZE THIS SYMBOL... OMG
Me going "oh dude...oh dudes..." the whole video. Poor bastards.😢
15:24 girl they trying to SAVE YOUR LIFE come on.
I've already listened to Mr Ballen and Joe Scott tell this story, but I'll still watch the video for you Simon. 😘
4:19 looks a bit like my seatbelt bolt.😮
When i think about what happened to the little girl it makes me sad :(
Talk about making every single wrong decision possible.