When a petty theft goes horribly wrong, radioactive material spreads like wildfire among the citizens of Goiânia, Brazil. In this five-episode scripted series based on true events, first responders, doctors, and nuclear physicists must race to contain the exponential damage if they want to save thousands of lives. Created by Gustavo Lipsztein (The Endless Night) and directed by Fernando Coimbra (Narcos), Radioactive Emergency stars Johnny Massaro (The Son of a Thousand Men), Paulo Gorgulho (The Endless Night), Bukassa Kabengele (Warden), and Antonio Saboia (The Mechanism).
So what really happened in the 1987 incident? Two thieves stole an unsecured radiotherapy machine from an abandoned hospital with little knowledge of the dangers it held. When they broke it apart to sell as scrap metal, they discovered a glowing blue powder that they then shared with family and friends as a curiosity. Unbeknownst to them, that phosphorescent substance was Cesium-137, an incredibly radioactive material that caused anyone who handled it to fall sick. When doctors investigated the unnatural illness that was sweeping the city, they isolated the cause as radioactive waste. Experts were called in from all over the country to help solve the nuclear crisis amid rising tensions between locals and politicians, all searching for someone to blame. The spread of contamination in the city ultimately caused four deaths, with over 100,000 people tested for radioactive poisoning.
The Brazilian thriller weaves together multiple viewpoints to give audiences a full picture of the three and a half months of terror caused by one simple theft, and the herculean efforts of Brazil’s scientific and medical communities to restore a sense of safety to the public. Stream the series now.
