DANGER FROM RADIUM

Evening Star, Issue 23380, 25 September 1939, Page 9

DANGER FROM RADIUM

PRECAUTIONS IN ENGLAND Because of the great danger to life if a store of radium were struck by a bomb, supplies possessed by hospitals are to be collected in time of war at certain centres and buried in special boreholes 60 feet deep, said the ‘ Manchester Guardian ’ in a recent article. There they would be safe from a direct hit from the heaviest bombs. One of the boreholes, which has just been completed at the Mount Vernon Hospital, Northwood, Middlesex, was inspected by Lady Sareourt, representing the board of governors of the hospital, and Dr H. A. Bolero, representing the Ministry of Health, after they had cut the first sods on the site of one of the Ministry’s new emergency hospitals. Dr John Read, one of the physicists at Mount Vernon Hospital, told a reporter that something like 20 grammes of radium, worth about £IOO,OOO, would be sent there from neighbouring hospitals- in the event of war. It would be put in the borehole in brass boxes sealed in a steel tube. If such a quantity of radium were hit by a bomb the area over which it was dispersed might become a death trap for many years, so great is the lethal power of uncontrolled radium. The new emergency hospital is being built in the grounds of the Mount Vernon Hospital, and will have 360 beds, with accommodation of medical staff and nurses. It is one of a number of emergency hospitals to be built on the outskirts of big cities, and forms part of the scheme for dealing with the evacuation of the London area.