Article in Philadelphia Inquirer

[Jim Hardeman <Jim_Hardeman@mail.dnr.state.ga.us>]

Fellow RADSAFEr's --

Below is an article that appeared in the October 6, 1997
Philadephia Inquirer ... it can be found on the web at
http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/97/Oct/06/international/RAD06.htm

Does anyone have any additional information ... in particular
the quantities of Cs-137 in these "containers"?

Oh ... yes, I'm aware that it's the Republic of Georgia ... not
the State of Georgia ... just a coincidence I guess <g>

Thanks!!

Jim Hardeman, Manager
Environmental Radiation Program
Environmental Protection Division
Georgia Department of Natural Resources
4244 International Parkway, Suite 114
Atlanta, GA 30354
(404) 362-2675  fax: (404) 362-2653
Jim_Hardeman@mail.dnr.state.ga.us

=================================

Georgian guards sickened by radioactive containers 

The containers were abandoned at a former Soviet military
base. The guards are being treated. 

By Suren Babayan
REUTERS

TBILISI, Georgia -- Ten Georgian border guards are being
treated for radiation sickness after 15 radioactive containers
were found abandoned in and around a former Soviet military
base, officials and doctors said yesterday.

``They have got high levels of radiation and will now have to be
treated for many years,'' said Sergei Filin, a Russian
physician helping to treat the victims.

Ten containers were buried at a shallow depth below what is
now a border guards' training center in Lilo, just outside the
former Soviet republic's capital, Tbilisi. Five more were found
outside the base, border guards chief Valery Chkheidze said.

He said four of the containers, used to calibrate radioactivity
measurement devices, had radioactive cesium in them.

Chkheidze said the canisters were abandoned without any
protection when the Soviet army handed over the base in
1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. No mention of
them was made during the handover, he said.

``We are talking about criminal nonchalance when dealing
with radioactive materials,'' Chkheidze said. ``There are
special standards for using radioactive materials . . . and
those materials must strictly never leave the territory of the
testing ground.''

He said the territory of all bases abandoned by the Soviet
army in Georgia would have to be tested.

Shukri Abramidze, a nuclear expert at a Georgian physics
research institute, was shocked at how the canisters were
abandoned.

``I have been working in this field for 40 years and have never
seen anything like it,'' he said.

Film footage broadcast by commercial Russian television
Channel NTV showed one of the soldiers in a hospital with a
red sore on his back. Another had a sore on a thigh.

Some of the doctors who have arrived to help the victims are
from a Russian medical center that helped treat victims of the
world's worst nuclear accident, at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in
1986.

A radiation safety expert identified as Noe Katamadze was
quoted by the ITAR-Tass news agency as saying the
radiation level at the Lilo base was now normal. ITAR-Tass
also said Georgian authorities had decided to set up a
special commission to investigate.