![]() ![]() It was an old machine, probably made about 1963 and used by the Methodist Hospital in Lubbock, Texas, until the cobalt-60 it contained had lost so much radioactive potency it no longer gave the high doses needed for cancer patients. The Picker had been in the warehouse six years. On December 6, they sold the load to a scrapyard for $10. They heaved the 46-pound metal cylinder into the back of the hospital's white Datsun pickup and tossed in a few other odds and ends. Sometime in late November 1983, Sotelo and Ricardo Hermanez, both employees at Centro Medico de Especialidades in Juarez, took the radioactive core of a Picker C-3000 cancer therapy machine from the hospital's warehouse. It had to do with ordinary actions and extraordinary consequences, with the role of chance and coincidence in the atomic age. What happened in Juarez a year ago had nothing to do with miscalculations or design error or even human error. ![]() In the end, all 50 states and much of Mexico had had a brush with the machine's remnants, and at least 200 Mexicans, including Sotelo and his neighbors, had received among the largest doses of radiation on record for the public. This accident started with a worn-out cancer therapy machine. It wasn't the sort of spectacular nuclear accident that we have come to expect, not a reactor ruptured by an unmapped fault line or an unpredicted shifting of winds over a bomb test site. There is no way to tell, just looking at the low, white houses and the baking streets, that the worst radioactive spill in North America occurred here. This is how Bellavista looks every summer afternoon. On Aldama Street, where Sotelo lives, there is only one tree, angled over the street as if faltering beneath the heat. Only children bother to come outside, lured by a man selling popsicles from a pushcart. On hot afternoons the streets of Bellavista are whitewashed with glare. Vincente Sotelo lives in Juarez, Mexico, in a neighborhood called Bellavista. ![]()
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