An accident in Mexico exposes scores of people to radiation
Victims are not usually culprits, but Vincente Sotelo is both. Sotelo, 29, unwittingly caused what some U.S. scientists are calling the worst nuclear accident ever in North America. As a result, he and 200 other residents of Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican town just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, are undergoing long-term tests for possible radiation poisoning, a condition that could result in genetic damage or cancer. Although Mexican authorities have been playing down the crisis, the people of Ciudad Juárez are the potential victims of exposure to dangerous levels of radiation.
The sequence of events that led to the disaster began last November. Sotelo, then a $35-a-week hospital electrician with a family of three, took a milk bottle-size, stainless-steel canister from the hospital's warehouse. Sotelo says hospital administrators had given him permission to sell leftover utensils for scrap. He heaved the canister into the back of a hospital truck and hauled it to a local junkyard, where a dealer gave him $10 for it. Unfortunately, Sotelo and the dealer were unaware that the canister was part of a radiography machine and contained a capsule that held approximately 6,000 pinhead pellets of cobalt 60, a powerful isotope used in the treatment of cancer. Later, at some undetermined point, the capsule in the canister broke open; hundreds of pellets were subsequently scattered throughout the truck and the junkyard. Even the junkyard's paperwork later proved to be radioactive. Many of the pellets in the dusty lot were pulverized and mixed up with the heaps of metal scrap.
Over the next two months, 20 junkyard workers were exposed to various levels of radiation. According to doctors, at least four of these men received very high doses. Two of the four absorbed 100 times the maximum amount of gamma rays that U.S. nuclear workers are allowed to receive in an entire year. One of the pair has sore gums; the other suffered nosebleeds. Says one investigating doctor: "Their chances of developing cancer are probably pretty good." The junkyard laborers are not the only ones at risk. The heavily contaminated truck that Sotelo had driven sat idle for two months on a narrow street in the town's crowded Bellavista neighborhood. (The vehicle was later removed to a compound near Juárez, and then to an isolated area 20 miles from the city.) "Children played on the truck," says Sotelo. "People would stand beside it, talking, and lean back on it."
The area of hazard grew even wider as radioactive scrap from the junkyard was transported to two Mexican foundries, one in Ciudad Juárez, the other 220 miles south in Chihuahua. According to José Antonio Rotonda of the Mexican Nuclear Commission, radioactive pellets that had adhered to scraps in the truck fell off en route to Chihuahua, and eight pockets of contamination have been discovered between the two cities.