Doomed to Fail - Ep 247: Contaminated - The Goiânia Accident

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

Let's talk about a real accidental nuclear accident - it's economic collapse, tied to poor security, that leads to deaths. In Brazil, while the economy collapsed in the 1980s, people tended to find scrap metal in buildings, including those that used to be hospitals, and those hospitals, in this case, had very dangerous radioactive materials left behind.   Those get stolen, and a crisis is afoot!  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortlandall James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow, America, what your country can do for you. Hello, hello, Taylor. Happy today, whatever today is. How are you doing today? Good, how are you? Pretty good, yeah. It's been an interesting couple of days.

I had a wedding I attended yesterday, which was awesome and so much fun in the Texas whole country, which is absolutely stunning. So it was fantastic. It was a great weekend. We did. I did. I just was like, what? No, that's awesome. We did, yeah, we just been hanging out.

I just kind of like was napping all morning. It was nice. That's great. That's great. Yeah. I'm going to be out playing a bunch of stuff later on. The weather here is just absolutely phenomenal. So fantastic, fantastic times out in Texas.

Do you want to introduce us? Yes. Hello, everyone. Welcome to doomed to fail. being historical disasters and failures and I am Taylor joined by Fars and today is Fars's turn tell us a story which is good because I don't have one.

Can you remind me which one of our listeners and mutual friends now told us about engineering disasters? Oh, Shannon, who is a friend of mine who works now at somewhere else but she used to be the librarian at a kid's school which is super fun. Very cool, very cool.

Well, Shannon, you, you also inspired me to focus on, you know what, it's sort of an engineering disaster, but it's sort of just an accident and it's sort of just stupid. And yeah, my story is a little bit unique today. So I guess I guess he encounters an engineering disaster. I'm going to be talking about a place in Brazil, which I literally had to keep looking up how you pronounce the name, because they have one of those little accent things. You're the pointy arrow accent. I don't totally know what that is. I mean, last night, this is very relevant.

We watched the first half of the new Anaconda with Paul Rudd and Jack Black. It's so fun. It's so funny. I love it so much. I laughed so freaking hard. We went to sleep because it was late, but we'll watch rest of it later. It's so funny so far. But they do speak in Portuguese, and Portuguese is insane.

I love the part in the beginning when they're like, they made us a bleep out of a movie because there's swear word. I like every word is a swear word. I like scream left like six times already. Yeah, it was really funny. Yeah, I highly recommend the new anaconda. But the point is Portuguese is impossible to understand. It's like sometimes you hear a Spanish word and sometimes you're like, what? And then nothing.

Well, I asked Claude to spell this up pretty phonetically. I want to be talking about a thing called the Gojaniha accident, which is a city in Brazil. or province. I can't remember exactly which one it is. And something essentially happened there. Like I said, it's kind of an engineering thing. It's kind of like a regulatory thing. It's kind of like a failure of government and a failure of like people's understanding of the world and how it works. So it's kind of like an all in one wrapped up story that we're going to be covering today. So personally, for us, what is Gwainia? It is pretty heavily populated. I didn't see what the population was when the story took place, but currently it's the 10th largest city in Brazil with the population. population about 1.5 million. The point I was trying to get out of this was it's densely packed. There was a lot of people here. So there was probably a lot of people back

then in this time, which was 1987. So that's the main thing to know about Gojaniha. Okay. Within Guyanja, in 1987, there was a private cancer treatment facility called the Guayano Institute for Radiotherapy. I obviously translated that. This not really called that, but I translated to English. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good. Good job. Taylor, do you know why we use radiation and cancer treatment? It stops cells from we're going. Yeah, yeah. It's just really bad for you, right?

Like, it's really bad for organic matter to be exposed to radioactivity. That's the whole point of it. It can disrupt the DNA process of cancer cells, but obviously the process of doing that, can also hurt the rest of your good cells. So there's a lot of like, it's got a whole thing. I did do the Marie Curie, and that was like radiation. like the beginnings of it, right? Yeah, yeah.

She heard her husband got the ball rolling on that side. Yeah. So there is a, up until this disaster happened, and I'll tell you all the reasons why after this disaster happened, why it's still longer the case. But a very prominent material that was used for radioactivity was a thing called C-CM-137, which is a non-naturally occurring. radioactive isotope, essentially.

We have to create this thing. I don't love that. Yeah. How this all works isn't entirely relevant, but I'll describe the contraption that contains the CCM because it's going to become really important later on in the conversation, okay? So, I mean, I'm trying to think like a thing that's like a modern thing we would know. It's kind of like when you go to the dentist and they put those things in your mouth and you have to bite down on it

and they put the little thing right next to your face and they shoot radiation through you. From what I could gather, this device looked like a very, like a much larger version of those with the thing that is aimed at you being the thing that contains the CCM. And I'm just going to describe how this looks, the container within, which holds the cesium. They're basically just little capsules, little metal capsules. It's not just pure metal. There's a bunch of different alloys. There's tongues.

and there's a whole layer of different materials that are kind of holding the CCM radioactive material. They're about four to five inches in diameter, or maybe six inches tall. There's a bunch of them. And the whole point of its entire engineering and design is twofold. One is to contain the CCM in a safe way in the middle.

And also to then reveal the CCM when it's time for the doctor's, to pass it through a patient's body. So it has a very narrow window that is closed most of the time until it's turned on, and then the CCM can just eject its radiation directly out, essentially. Okay. In 1977, the Radiotherapy Institute purchased a machine that used these capsules with the CCM to apply radiation, and by 1985, that institute had opened a new facility.

So you have the original institute. was running, bought this thing in 1977. They shut down in 1985 and they moved their facilities elsewhere. The original institute had been built on land owned by a Catholic charity. When the institute had been built, the owners had leased the land from this charity. By 1985, when the institute had moved, the charity wanted to land back, but now there was a building on top of it. This resulted in a very long protracted legal battle between the two parties.

the Institute claiming that it owns the building and the charity claiming that it owns the building because it's on top of its own on top of its land. That's kind of where we are at this point. That's hilarious. So these two are lock and horns on this issue and it all happened

before this institute could dismantle or relocate this device that contains this radioactive isotope. So they left and they left it in this abandoned facility. The institute's moved on essentially. But they didn't make it with them? They did not take it with them.

Why not? Did they stop doing that type of treatment? I don't know if they stopped doing that kind of treatment or not. I know that well, they probably started using new machines and they're like, we're going to leave this here and the court will figure out what to do with it essentially. The court granted an injunction, sorry, the court granted an injunction saying that nobody can enter this facility until this dispute is resolved. The Institute owners were like, there's a murder machine in here. We should go take care of this thing.

Yeah. It's unattended. It's sitting in the middle of this huge city, you know, totally empty on all that good stuff. The court noted how dangerous this was. And they decided that even though it's dangerous, because of this injunction, nobody can enter and secure it. But they would allow. is for these folks on their own done

to privately hire security to just be stationed outside and make sure nobody kind of goes in and mess with it or fiddles with it. How long would it take to get rid of it? Like not long. Yeah, I don't imagine it would be that long. I don't know why the court was so,

I didn't get clarity on why they were so stubborn about this. Even though like the records did show that a lot of people really, this is really dangerous and you should do something about and then court acknowledged that and still didn't care. Weird. During this time, we're talking about in 1987, Brazil was in really rough shape. So apparently annual inflation was 366%, which is the number that nobody in America will ever even remotely understand what that number means.

Yeah. The currency there was worthless. They apparently churned through about four or five different types of currencies because they just became devalued so fast. Oh, wow. People were basically just broke and desperate, which is going to create the exact nightmare fuel to what we're going to discuss here in a second. Yeah. one way that people made money was they would break into abandoned buildings and scavenge materials that they could sell. Yeah.

You see where I'm going? I would literally do that. Yeah. Like, no shit, people did that. Oh, my God. I'm nervous because something bad is going to happen, which I know is the premise of the show, but it's going to be bad. This is definitely a doomed to fail situation. Crap.

On September 13th, 1987, apparently the security that these private companies had called or hired to work, didn't show up to work. And on that same day, these two guys, a guy named Roberto Alves and Wagner Pereira, they broke into the facility with the objective to find in scrap metal. But the problem was by this point, the facility actually had broken into quite a few times since it had been abandoned two years prior. So it really wasn't much to scrap except this cancer therapy machine. Oh, my God. So they start disassembling parts of it, and they find these metal capsules inside, the ones that I had described contained the CCM 137, and the two put them in a wheelbarrel and decided to take them home.

God. I mean, of course they did. They didn't know, right? They didn't know. Yeah. That night, they both got sick. they were suffering from radiation poisoning immediately. But they didn't know it.

Was it, what they inside like a lead box in the machine, whatever, like essentially? Yeah. Or were they always leaking radiation into the building? Or like they just like, these guys like opened it. No, one thing that was clear was like there was nothing wrong with the machine. There was nothing wrong with the capsule containing the CCM. It was a, it was like a regulatory failure and a failure of security, essentially. That was really what happened.

So, yeah, that exact same night, they started getting sick from radiation poisoning. And obviously they don't know what's going on. They just assumed they had food poisoning and carried on with their lives, right? Yeah, yeah. One thing about CCM-137, that's pretty cool. It glows bright blue. So if you look up a thing called Cherenkov radiation, you'll see images of this blue radioactive color that shows up. usually like

it's funny CCM 137 was different it always gave off this color and I don't think that's the case with every other type of radioactive material but if you look up chair and cob radiation you actually see it looks really cool pretty also

CCM 137 of the powder is basically like salt oh okay yeah something to keep in mind three days well that's actually going to be relevant towards the end here three days after they had brought

this stuff back home and while they were already suffering the symptoms of radiation sickness, Roberto, remember when I told you that the way those capsules were engineered, they have to, like, once it's activated, it has to, like, rotate a specific way. And then once it rotates in that specific way, it beams the radiation directly from a hole inside the capsule. Got it. What Roberto had done was he used a screwdriver to pierce a hole in the capsule. So he found where it comes out and just like sort of jamming a screwdriver in it until he got through.

Oh, God. He didn't think much of this. And by September 18th, so about five days after they first broke in, he sold the capsules to a scrapyard owner named DeVare Ferreira. DeVere saw the light that was literally just concentrated radiation aimed straight at him. And he thought it was really cool. He decided he wanted to show his family and friends. So he took these capsules that had been punctured and pierced, fully exposing the radiation back to his house. His friends, some of them, also thought it was cool and wanted to take it home with them too.

So what they would do is just literally scoop out the radioactive powder and just distributed amongst themselves. And they would just like put in their pocket and take it home to show their families. Oh, geez. By September 25th, DeVeer's wife, a woman named Maria, had started suffering. the effects of radiation sickness. And DeVarro was like, you know what? Like, I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that Maria was like, hey, our lives started going really bad once you brought these things home, take them somewhere else.

So DeVare ended up selling them to another scrapyard. Okay. And this we do know that Maria, DeVare's wife, was kind of the one that kind of connected these dots. She thought the capsules had someone to do with the fact that everybody around them are starting get sick. And so she ended up going to this scrapyard that her husband had sold these two, collected them up and put them in a plastic

bag, got on the city bus, fully exposing everybody to this stuff, and took them to the health department. Yeah, she apparently walked in and told some junior staffers that quote, this is what's killing my family.

She definitely, it's not her fault, but like, it sucks. Yeah, no, she, I mean, She didn't know. Nobody knew. Yeah. I'm telling you right now, like, these people didn't know what they were dealing with, frankly. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, that was literally my next line. Like, she's at the public health department, and even those people don't understand what's going on. It was entirely by a happenstance that there was a physician who was visiting, like a medical physicist that was visiting, a guy named Walter Ferreira. He just happened to be in the apartment that day. And he heard about what was going on. with this little baggie full of this like blue powder that was glowing and he went and grabbed a device that he had in this hotel room called the Cintillation counter which measured radioactivity he tested on the bag of the bag it goes off the scale it's like super radioactive right oh my god yeah he contacts

state local and national officials to let them know what's going on as well as c n-en which is their version of oh i forgot what our version actually is their mind it's the natural nuclear energy commission in Brazil, what was ours called? I have no idea. Anyways, investigators started tracing every person who may have come into contact with the capsules or the CCM powder.

And it was a lot, right? Because people just like taking this stuff home. It's being traveled through the middle of the city on a city bus. 112,000 people were suspected of either irradiation or contamination. I learned what that means. Irradiation is when the thing is affecting.

you while it's like present and then it doesn't doesn't affect you anymore so that's good yeah so if you go into a room with some stuff there but you're not super close to it and it's not fully exposed like you're getting irradiated but then you leave and like your cells just do the wrong thing contamination is like you're you're cooked like your your cells are already denatured yeah so 20 people required intense hospitalization four people died directly with two more dying later on for causes that you could say is probably attributable to cell damage, but it wasn't directly tied to contamination. So I'm going to call it six, but four officially died of this. This is like over like a week. Like it's not even that long. Yeah. Maria DeVare's wife who figured all this

out initially. She died and she actually died on the same day as her six-year-old niece, a little girl named lead Ferreira. And man, that one was a sad story. So her dad was this other guy I'm going to talk about here in a little bit because he also died. He took this powder home. He's one of the friends who just thought it was really fun. Yeah.

He put in his pocket and took it home to his kid. And the kid was playing with it. It's a kid. It's like glowing blue powder and she was painting it on her face. And like it was. Yeah, it was one of those situations. That's so sad. But she died on the same day.

as Maria. So that would have been the 23rd of October's when I think those two died. There was these other two kids. One's 18. One's like 22. Getting Admelson, who was an employee of the scrapyard, he died of lung and heart damage. And then another one, this

22 real kid named Israel, he also died of, I forgot what it was, but it was cell damage essentially. DeVare himself also died and Leeds father, the one who brought this stuff home and let her play with it, he also died.

So that's the universe of folks that are directly suffering because of this. The two guys who put all this in motion by stealing the capsules to begin with, they both ended up losing body parts. They lost fingers, arms. They suffered from radiation sickness. Really interesting, they never went to jail for it because they were like nobody, they didn't know. They didn't know what they were doing was potentially going to result in loss of life.

Right. They didn't like kill. I mean, they shouldn't have stolen stuff. Yeah. But like, they didn't know. So they actually escaped all responsibility on this one. 41 homes were completely demolished furniture, family heirlooms, topsole, all this different stuff was essentially buried. There was a storage facility that was constructed specifically for this purpose.

It was basically sealed concrete bunkers. And everything that they. suspected had come into contact with this product, not product. It's like it's like drugs or anything. With the CCM 137, all that went into the concrete bunker, it apparently has to stay there for about 300 years before the area is safe again. Wow. Which like even today, this area is still more irradiated than anywhere else because of what happened in 1987. There was like a stigma around this stuff because people who were from this area, if they traveled to other parts of Brazil,

they're basically discriminated against. Like, you weren't allowed to, like, fly on airplanes where they were kicked off airplanes or not allowed to check into hotels. Also, products that came from this area were also, out of what the word is for it. They were like...

Shadow banned. Yeah. Yeah, they were banned. People just didn't want to buy it. They thought it was too risky. There was... I wouldn't buy, like, Chernobyl seltre water. I mean, now I probably would. I don't know. of fun, especially it was blue. Apparently,

apparently people in this area also were protesting, burying the dead in the cemeteries in town. They're like, well, now I can't visit you know, Bravestones that I want to visit. And what's interesting is, like, this keeps happening. So,

I forgot what the exact term for this is, but the lack of security in some parts of the world around radioactive material. It just keeps happening. So I found several other examples. So in the year 2000, entirely, and three people died when someone literally opened a machine just like this there. In the Republic of Georgia, apparently, there's a thing where generators, back during the Soviet Union days, they used a thing called strontium 90, another radioactive

material, to generate electricity. And these things were just like everywhere. Like there's... Like in your house? Well, no, in this case it was in the forest. It was basically what happened was some forestry workers were like abandoned out in the forest. I guess I don't know, whatever they, their mule broke down. I don't know what they do. And they found this generator and they're freezing of death. And so they just like cozyed up next to it as it was running.

They were sitting dosed with strontium 90 and they all died. And I was thinking, I was like, I should have researched with more. But I was like, how many of these things are all over the former Soviet Union? Like it's got to be. I bet so many. And the fact that they were just sleeping next to it And that's what it took to get a get contaminated and die It also happened in 2010 in India

In 2013 in Mexico it just keeps on happening And there's a ton of like smaller events where people are Contaminated but then they don't die I mean at this point I think it's safe to say We have like radiation going everywhere Because you just hand it off to the next person Because it's always on you Right exactly what he says to do

It was fascinating They had to come up with like a practice on how to de-radiate their urine and feces and they had to do all this it was great like the amount of work that goes in to try and contain

this thing once it happens I mean it literally just reminds me of like COVID and now haunts a virus like it's just gonna be that like it's like once the guine's down the box it seems like there's no point even trying to put it back in the box but yeah

um so but yeah that's that's my story where does it I don't know if you know that. Like, where do you get it in the first place? You said it was like a man-made thing. So, like, someone makes it for the specific purpose of a generator or a cancer medicine or whatever, right?

Is that what happens? Yeah. I think, I think, let's say the generator equation, the thing out of the equation, because that's USSR and who knows what the hell they're constraints are. But these are, like, these manufacturers of devices that require radioactive material, they're under such heavy regulation. federally that yeah they get access to this material by virtual what they're producing and they have a lot of oversight

because of it so it's not easy to get your hands on it. Now they don't use this anymore by the way like the CCM 137 it's not a thing anymore and the reason for it is because of this kind of story the fact that it is a powder

you know one thing I didn't mention was that physicist when he first found it he freaked out And what was going to happen was the firefighters were called and they were going to come over there and start spraying the thing. And he was like, I got to get ahead of this because if they start spraying this, it's going to spread this powder everywhere. That's how light it was. And now because of that, they don't use CCM 137 at all for this use case. They use solid materials and things like that because it can't spread.

You can't just take a piece of it and give it to. a little girl to play with and paint her face with. Right. Like, it's not like a as easily like we can put your hand and blow it on someone. Yeah. Yeah. So that's another thing that changes is the use of this powder is no longer a thing.

But, yeah. Where's the building? Did they knock down the building? They knock down the building. Yeah. They knocked everything down. I mean, everything. They knock knocked down the building. They knocked down the salvage yard. Both of them that contained some of this

stuff, like they had to basically take everything that could have been exposed to shove it into that concrete bunker. Wow. Yeah. So. That's wild. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. I know there's like, aren't there like lost nuclear

bombs? It's a true. I heard there was one in South Carolina, right? It was something like that. I don't know, but some like idiot is going to find it. Once, you know. There was a great, there was a great

John for both. The movie called them. broken arrow lost arrow broken arrow i think broken arrow yeah that's what it was yeah about a missing nuclear bomb yeah i feel like that's some i mean i don't even think it's like necessarily gonna gonna gonna like dead day i think someone's gonna open it and be like cool what are these things you know yeah 100% and that like just like this and because like why wouldn't they yeah yeah yeah yeah it seems to be more of a thing in less developed countries yeah but we're working our way up cool I never heard of that that's crazy

yeah it's so bad for everyone it was it was sad I felt I felt the worst for the wife because I'm like you know her husband brings home stupid shit she was like you idiot please yeah yeah what I was reading how like he just thought it was like magic or something it was like this is like some wondrous new discovery

I've made and so I need to show it to everyone. Exactly. And it was a new discovery for him, but it was very bad for anybody else. Not for everybody else. Yeah, I was thinking that too. Also, if you don't know what it is, you would be like, this is magic or maybe like something divine or whatever, you know. Yeah. Well, that's awful. And I feel sad for everyone. Would you call this an entry disaster or not really, right? Maybe it's just an accident. I don't know. It's an accident, but I mean, it's like a failure of a lot of people to like

keep something safe that they should have to keep them more safe. Yeah. You know, like, it's fair. It should have been, I mean, but I don't know if that would have like deterred them from going in necessarily.

If it would have been like, um, like, oh, don't come here. It's dangerous. They probably would have been like, well,

fuck you, you know? So that was actually also part of the reason why they were never charged because there was never any warnings about it. Oh. Yeah. Okay. That's not good.

Yeah. Yeah. That's bad. I watched like a really sad forensic files about a woman who, in Georgia who like her whole life all she wanted to do was live in a house looked at the house and gone with the wind and she got successful and she built it and then like there was a leak in the floor and the insurance wouldn't let her fix it because they wanted to send someone out to look at it so she didn't get to fix it for like a month and a black mold grew and it like destroyed the house it ruined her husband's life like he became a different person because it was like in his brain and then she can't go to her beautiful house anymore but people still go and like steal her stuff but they steal her stuff and it's contaminated with all this black mold you yeah So she's like, I can't go without this like suit. And every time I go in to my beautiful house that I've like wanted my whole life that right now is gone, more stuff is missing because people keep robbing it.

And they're just like pulling, putting the stuff in people's houses. You know? Like you can't contain those things. Like you have to do a concrete bunker. And then someday someone's going to open that fucking concrete bunker and be like, I wonder what the ancient people hidden here. And it'll be like, disease. Yeah.

300 years I mean that's yeah like I'd even convey the message 300 years in the future to the AI I actually I feel like there are some things God is this true or that I like read it in a book or something where it was like they were putting like

nuclear stuff somewhere and they had to like draw pictures you know of like yeah that was that was a 99% invisible story where they were trying to figure out like something was it was a it was like a 10,000 year thing. It was like something was in a radio 10,000 years. And they were

like, all these signs were going back in history like, what language survived that long? What has possibly survived that long? And like, the thing they I don't know if they did it or not, but basically like it was someone on lines of stories

across cultures, even cultures that no longer are around changing time. They get passed down. And so they were like, means to be a story about cats that glow and if you see a cat that glows don't go here. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it's probably why like, ancient Egyptians were like, don't open these tombs and we did anyway. I know. Literally had pictures of cats on them. We didn't like to do this. I know. And that was even 10,000 years ago. Again, Shannon's, thank you for telling us about engineering disasters. I know, again, this isn't really fit that mold necessarily, but it definitely got the wheels in motion on all things engineering.

I was actually going to cover some plane crashes. I was like, I'm kind of going to go up for plane crashes. So I went with this said. But if you all the other ideas, please tell us because we are looking for them. Yeah, that's really, yeah, it's weird that I never heard of that, too. You know, that these crazy things happen all over the world and, like, it changes lives permanently. Yeah.

Yeah. So do we have any fun listener mail? No, I don't have any listener mail. I am excited that Learned League starts tomorrow. Yeah, I'm thrilled. For those that don't know, Taylor and I take part in this online trivia thing, and it is really challenging. It's really hard.

It's fun. And I am number 27 out of 30 right now. So. It's okay. It's going to get better. It's going to get better. We got lots of time still. I think I hit a top five one time.

You did. You got really high at least once, so we'll see what happens. See if we do it again. Cool. Well, thank you for that story. Thanks, everyone for listening. If you have any ideas, let us know. Doom to Fail pod at g-mell.com and Doom to Fail on all of the socials.

Doofel Pod. It's us. We just write to us. Yeah. Tell us what you want to hear. Or don't want to hear. Whatever. Just write to us.

Sure. Sweet teller, I'll go ahead and code off there. Cool. Thank you. Yep. Thank you.