In 1985, a private hospital in Goiânia, Brazil, constructed a new building and relocated. This hospital, a cancer treatment center, had been using an old cesium-137 radiation therapy machine in its former city-center building. Upon moving to the new facility, the hospital purchased a new cobalt-60 therapy machine. The old cesium-137 machine was left behind in the abandoned building because there was no proper place to dispose of it. Two years later, two young men without regular jobs, idling around the abandoned hospital, discovered the old cesium-137 machine. Their discovery triggered a bizarre environmental disaster.