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rah
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Apolyton Prince of Moderators, Master of Reason
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Lord of the Ferrets
Jan 1970
time: 23:27
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You guessed it 
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Looters broke into nuclear plant
Some use barrels for storing water
By Christine Spolar
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published May 6, 2003
AL WADIYA, Iraq -- Halina Haloul was happy when her 15-year-old son rolled home one of the shiny blue barrels from Tuweitha nuclear plant. Young Faisal had run in, nabbed it from among hundreds of barrels filled with mysterious yellow dust and cleaned it up so well that the family planned to store drinking water in it.
Then American soldiers knocked on her door. Suddenly, Haloul and all her neighbors in this raw, dusty village were told they had rolled little toxic waste sites straight into their homes.
"We didn't know," Haloul said as she breast-fed a 20-day-old daughter in her two-room home, a dirt-floor hovel where a couple of chickens roosted with the rest of her family. "We got the barrel right before the baby was born."
Almost a month ago, looters who descended on Tuweitha compound, the main site of Iraq's nuclear program and one of the most suspect weapons sites examined by UN inspectors before the war, made off with potentially deadly booty. Dozens of metal and plastic barrels of toxic waste appear to be missing from the 3-acre site.
On Monday, officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN-affiliated group that guarded the plant during years of inspection, appealed for teams to be allowed to enter Iraq to figure out just what dangers now lurk in area surrounding Tuweitha.
Tons of radioactive waste and low-level enriched uranium were on the premises and kept sealed from the outside world before the war, one official said. Now no one has any idea how much of the potentially harmful substances are missing, he added.
IAEA `absolutely concerned'
"We are absolutely concerned," said Mark Gwozdecky, spokesman for the atomic energy agency.
Gwozdecky said the agency was alerted on April 9 that the compound, about 30 miles from downtown Baghdad, had been broken into during the days of chaos following the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein. The agency contacted U.S. representatives twice--on April 11 and April 30--after reports emerged of looting at the plant, home to four reactors. The U.S. military has yet to respond about how it secured Tuweitha, if it did, in the first days of war.
Over the years of inspection, the nuclear agency documented that the plant had tons of radioactive waste and a substance known as yellow cake, a uranium derivative that must be substantially refined to be used in a nuclear weapon but still is regarded as a hazardous material.
In the wake of the looting, Gwozdecky said, the agency had serious concerns that people near the plant, as well as the environment, might be harmed.
In addition, looters broke into a laboratory where thousands of screw worms, a parasite that infests farm animals, were being bred for use in a vaccination project. All those worms were set free by looters, and the the agency could not estimate the effect that would have on the environment, Gwozdecky said.
Employees from the nuclear plant said they quickly alerted U.S. soldiers to the problem, but villagers appeared to have been warned about the barrels only when news reports of the toxicity surfaced.
"They were nice, clean, bright containers," said one plant scientist who declined to give his name. "They were well-built, without any possibility for corrosion. That's why people wanted them. There were at least 200 barrels there. I think they've only been able to get 20 percent of them back."
Army guards at the front of the plant would not discuss the potential hazards. About 2 miles away, near an isolated building littered with large, dusty barrels, soldiers said they had been warning people, for fear of contamination, not to walk past the front gate.
A week ago, Army hazardous materials teams tested the one building near where five soldiers slept under the open sky.
"The scientists came in and their Geiger counters were just screaming," said Sgt. Brian Keller, one of the guards.
`Everyone took one'
Some villagers, for at least a week if not longer, used the barrels for storing water, fuel or even milk. Many said they threw out the barrels as soon as they heard about a health risk. Some said that when they snatched the barrels from Tuweitha, they dumped the yellow dust near the plant.
A few villagers in the hardscrabble land apparently cannot quite bear giving up the nice-looking barrels.
"Everybody took one," said Mutar Ayel, a 55-year-old father of 12 who lives on the edge of Al Wadiyah and has kept one of the barrels on his roof. His barrel is marked No. 119.
Ayel said he has heard there is a problem with the barrels.
"They say they can make you sick," he said. But he is not convinced there isn't some good use for the plastic container. Only a few people he knew complained that they didn't feel well after handling the barrels, he said.
"I'm not going to throw it away," he said. "Somebody, sometime, might want it. Do you want to buy a barrel?"
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
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Well at least Darwinism will help the world in this instance. Especially for Mutar Ayel. It must take extreme brain power to loot "NUMBERED" barrels from a nuclear plant. Suspicious yellow powder, don't worry, I dumped it and cleaned out the barrel. Storing drinking water in it now. I don't even think people in rural Mississippi would be this stupid. (but you never know. )
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Jack_www
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How could these people not know if they lived so close to a nuclear power plant? I mean Iraq still had schools under Sadam, you cant tell me that they were that bad that should have know radiation is bad, and often takes a while to effect you.
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gsmoove23
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I of course feel the same way about my grandparents, because they're saints, cause they're my grandparents, but honestly I can't say. All I know is that compared to these particular Iraqis I've lived in the lap of luxury my whole life, with an education that would blow they're minds and the use of the darwin award in this instance seems like your nominating yourself, except of course you won't die from radiation poisoning from it.
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Jack_www
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I think they did not think to secure the nuclear plant right away was that they may have thougth the mobs of people on the streets would not be dumb enough to loot a nuclear power plant.
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Aro
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Ipanema
Jul 2002
time: 02:27
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"We didn't know," Haloul said as she breast-fed a 20-day-old daughter in her two-room home, a dirt-floor hovel where a couple of chickens roosted with the rest of her family. "We got the barrel right before the baby was born."
Rah, if you are living in the XVIIIth century, with nothing but the Koran to teach you how the world works - literally... Yep, you may do things like that. "Radiation - Keep Out" in Arabic, with armed guards, means "something valuable is stored in this place" in common language, if you don't have the background to understand it.
It's not stupidity, even if they did it after being warned about the dangers... They don't have many reasons to trust in authorities. Not in Iraq. The religious leader, or the local tribal chief are probably the only people they are used to trust.
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Aro
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Ipanema
Jul 2002
time: 02:27
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quote:
Originally posted by rah
......................
ONLY A FEW PEOPLE COMPLAINED. I think if even one had complained I might have been suspicious and might have put a little weight in the warnings. This is just stupidity.
RAH |
Same with me, Rah. But we are well-educated men of our times. We're learning the "scientific method" since we were born...
Rah, you don't know the "absolute" poverty or ignorance, do you? I mean, have you seen what poverty, prejudices, obscurantism, fundamentalism, illiteracy, old social structures, old beliefs and dictatorships, all mixed together, can do?
A significant part of our world can't see any of those clues. They can't read the signs. They aren't trained to do that.
"ONLY A FEW PEOPLE COMPLAINED."
In a place with high mortality rates, caused by the lack of basic services (like regions of Iraq... or Brazil...), health is a matter of bad or good luck.
I've seen this kind of behavior here in Brazil, in regions of extreme poverty and absence of the State. Intelligent people, able to deal with many problems and figure out intelligent solutions... But some problems are just beyond their ability to understand.
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gsmoove23
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Actually, hes not so stupid as oportunistic. He doesn't want to use it, just sell it to some other sucker.
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06-05-2003 22:36
He sounds like my grandmother.
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