‘Almost no surveillance’ of Eagle leach pad

Victoria Gold wasn’t paying enough attention to the Eagle mine heap leach pad before its catastrophic landslide in Yukon last year, an accident investigator says.

The carelessness was a major contributor, Mark E. Smith, a member of the Independent Review Board (IRB) and a geotechnical engineer, said at a news conference Tuesday in Whitehorse.

“[Eagle] had almost no surveillance,” he said. “We think the bar should be vastly higher than this site. But honestly, the practice in the industry isn’t high enough. We need better surveillance of these facilities across the board.”

Smith spoke less than one week after the IRB released its final report into the causes of the heap leach accident on June 24 last year. The board concluded that a precise combination of factors also including poor drainage of the heap leach pad, fine-grained ore and too much pressure and weight caused the heap to collapse. Whether a formal public inquiry is held into the accident may depend on the government reviewing the board’s report, an official said.

Cost-cutting?

Asked whether the lack of surveillance of the heap leach pad was a cost-cutting measure, Smith responded that it could have been, though he didn’t assign any blame.

“How can we connect the dots between that and the failure?” he asked. “I don’t have any real insight into anybody’s motive here, but it’s unquestionable that some things could have been done better.”

So far, the territory has authorized receiver PricewaterhouseCoopers for $220 million in spending on the site while the expense of proper procedures ahead of time would have been negligible, the investigator said.

“The cost burden that’s now been put on the Yukon taxpayers for the Eagle failure would fund all of our recommendations on every mining project that will ever be proposed in the Yukon,” Smith said. “Cost wise, it’s nothing in comparison.”

Failure a rarity

The landslide released millions of tonnes of ore and at least 280,000 cubic metres of cyanide-containing solution beyond containment. Victoria Gold was put into receivership last August and clean-up of the site has been ongoing since then. PricewaterhouseCoopers put the mine site up for sale last month. The deadline for initial bids is Aug. 6 and the closing date for the successful bid is Dec. 31. 

Heap leach failures are statistically rare if all safety measures are carefully followed, Smith said. Still, he noted that the Eagle accident was among two last year out of six failures in heap leaching’s 45-year history that were the most catastrophic. The other accident last year was at SSR Mining’s (TSX, Nasdaq: SSRM; ASX: SSR) Çöpler gold mine in Turkey, where nine people died in the landslide.  

“[SSR’s] survey data showed they were on the path to failure about four days before the failure, probably too late stop [it], but not too late to take protective actions against the people that ultimately died,” Smith said.

Two-month window

There was potentially a two-month window to stop the accident at Eagle if deformation of the slope due to increased irrigation with solution in April 2024 was noticed sooner.

“I would like to think that would raise a red flag, and somebody would’ve looked deeper,” he said. “If they had seen that data and then turned those sprinklers off, it may have stopped the failure completely.”

The board wasn’t asked to attach costs to its recommendations and recommending a public inquiry based on its conclusions wasn’t part of its mission, Smith said.

“Nobody asked us to opine on that,” he said. “It depends on the purpose of the inquiry. If it’s to place blame for financial liability, then that falls into the civil litigation. If it’s to create a more robust mining industry, that’s our recommendations.”