In the eighties of the last century, an incident occurred in the city of Kramatorsk of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic that eyewitnesses still recall with shudder, and those who have not heard about this story before often perceive it as a terrible urban legend. Unfortunately, this tragedy really happened, crippling many lives. Even in the West, it is widely known as a cautionary tale about safety in working with radioactive elements.
In 1981, in one of the apartments of a local new building at number seven, an eighteen-year-old girl, who until recently was distinguished by exemplary health, died. A year later, her sixteen-year-old brother died in the hospital, and a little later, their mother. The empty apartment was handed over to a new family, but after a while their teenage son also mysteriously fell ill with an incurable illness and departed into another world.
The cause of death of all these people was leukemia, popularly known as blood cancer. Diseases in the second family were attributed by doctors to bad heredity, without linking them to a similar diagnosis from the previous owners of the apartment. You might think that the apartments were cursed and mystically sucked energy out of the tenants, but the reality turned out to be much more prosaic and more terrible, since it was not a supernatural evil, for example, a curse, that was to blame, but the unforgivable negligence of people, negligence bordering on a crime.
Scary radioactive capsule
Shortly before the teenager's death, a carpet was hung on the wall in his room. When the young man had already passed away, his parents suddenly noticed that a burnt spot had formed on the carpet. The father of the deceased boy has made a thorough investigation. When the specialists who visited the apartment turned on the Geiger counter, they ran out in shock and ordered to evacuate the house - the radiation in the dwelling exceeded the maximum permissible level hundreds of times! It is not surprising that people fell ill with blood cancer here on a massive scale.
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The arriving experts in protective suits found a capsule with the strongest radioactive substance Cesium-137 embedded in the wall. The ampoule with this terrible nuclide had dimensions of only four by eight millimeters, but it emitted two hundred roentgens per hour, irradiating not only these apartments, but also three adjacent apartments. The investigation showed that in the Karansk granite quarry, which supplied building materials for the construction of new buildings in Kramatorsk, a similar radioactive capsule used in the level gauge was lost in the late seventies. Probably, she accidentally fell into the stones from which they built a house, which was, of course, unacceptable. According to the charter, the workers of the quarry had to search at least the entire mine, but find a dangerous part, but apparently no one did this.
Experts removed a piece of the wall with a radioactive ampoule and sent it to employees of the Kiev Institute of Nuclear Research. And the gamma radiation in house number seven immediately disappeared, and it finally became safe to live in it. Between 1981 and 1989, six residents of the new building died from radiation, four of whom were minors. Another seventeen people received disabilities. Nobody was punished for such a fatal mistake.