The Goiania Accident: Background information when reading You Glow in the Dark

The Goiania Accident

This article relates to You Glow in the Dark

In the title story of You Glow in the Dark, scrap metal scavengers uncover a strange glowing capsule in the ruins of an abandoned hospital. Dazzled by the beautiful blue particles that glow in the dark, they spread radioactive poison throughout their community, leaving illness and death everywhere they go. When the accident is finally contained, it takes on a religious quality, with the victims seen as saints and living miracles and the disaster itself an uncontrollable act of God.

The actual incident closely mirrored in Liliana Colanzi's story occurred in Goiania, Brazil on September 13th, 1987. Like in the story, two scavengers exploring an abandoned radiation therapy clinic discovered a capsule and took it to a scrap metal dealer in Goiania who purchased it for $25.

When the capsule was opened it revealed a glowing blue "salt-like" substance that was Cesium-137, a radioactive isotope and a deadly byproduct of nuclear fission processes. Unaware that he was dealing with one of the most dangerous substances on Earth, the scrap dealer gave the powder to friends as gifts and even allowed his six-year-old niece to smear it all over her body. In just a few days the powder had spread around the city of roughly one million people and those who had first handled the substance were beginning to exhibit symptoms of radiation sickness.

The Chernobyl disaster had occurred only the year before, and Brazilian authorities, when they learned about the incident nearly 16 days after the capsule was taken, moved quickly to quarantine those exposed and begin the decontamination process. They screened over 100,000 people for contamination and ultimately found 249 people who had received extreme exposure. Sadly, both the scrap yard owner's wife and niece were among the four immediate fatalities.

While not the result of an accident on the level of Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, the Goiania incident was nonetheless largely caused by extensive human error and ignorance. It began with the doctors and administrators who abandoned the clinic without alerting authorities that highly radioactive and dangerous equipment was still in the building. Leaving the site unguarded offered easy access to scavengers and a lack of education on the identification of radioactive substances likely contributed to the general public's inability to see how dangerous something they viewed as simply beautiful and delightful to play with really was.

The Goiania incident has all but vanished from history, perhaps because it did not occur as the result of a massive explosion or in an area widely reported on in the world. But it haunted the region and the people. Citizens fought to prevent the dead from being buried, in lead-lined coffins, in the local cemetery out of fear of contamination. Concern over who might be infected and how communicable the contamination was caused members of the community to be ostracized, homes demolished, belongings destroyed. Even the local economy was affected by an unwillingness to buy food or other products from Goiania.

In Colanzi's story, the scrap yard owner survives the incident to become an object of almost religious fascination. Crowds pay a fee to view his drunken, unconscious form lighting up the night with a surreal blue glow. In reality, having buried his wife and niece, he lived only another few years before succumbing to alcoholism and depression. As recently as 2018 victims and their relatives were still working to get compensation but the government has yet to recognize them.

Radioactive source of Goiania accident
Photo courtesy of IAEA (CC BY 2.0)

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to You Glow in the Dark. It first ran in the March 6, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.