The mayor of Mayo, Yukon, said a heap leach failure and landslide at the Eagle gold mine reported on Monday will have a “tremendous impact” on his community and the entire area.
Mayor Trevor Ellis said he was shocked by the incident, which led to the suspension of mining operations indefinitely.
“‘Catastrophic’ would probably be a good description of it, as far as I know,” he said of the incident.
Few details have been released about what happened and the extent of the damage at Victoria Gold’s mine site. In a brief statement on Monday, the company said there had been a failure at the tailings leach platform on the mine site – about 80 kilometres north of Mayo – and that there had been “some damage to infrastructure and part of the failure had left containment”.
According to the Yukon’s Occupational Safety and Compensation Authority, Monday’s heap leach failure “resulted in a material slide” on the mine site.
The Eagle Mine’s heap leach plant uses a cyanide solution that seeps through the ore, which is stored in 10-metre-high layers, and dissolves the gold. The company’s website states that about one million tonnes of ore are processed using this method each month.
Ellis said he was pleased to hear that no one was injured in Monday’s incident.
“Now we just hope and pray that everything is OK ecologically and that not too much of this toxic wastewater has entered a waterway. And if it has, that it has been contained and the environmental damage has been reduced,” he said.
Ellis said there was a lot of speculation in the town about what this might mean for the future of the mine, which employs up to 500 people when fully operational. Ellis hopes the incident will not lead to a prolonged closure or “the end of the mine.”
He said that as a city councilor years ago, when the mine was originally developed, he was involved in many planning meetings.
“It always seemed like the worst case scenario, and that’s what happened today,” he said Monday.
“I think this is a sad day for the entire area.”
“Horrible and deeply worrying”: NDP leader
Kate White, leader of the NDP in the Yukon Territory and her party’s mining critic, said on Monday that she was also grateful that no one was injured at the Eagle Mine. However, there are “many questions” about what exactly happened.
She called the incident “appalling and deeply worrying.”
“Of course, no one plans for a technological disaster like this – I prefer to call it a ‘catastrophe’ or something like a technological failure at this point – but the truth is that there will always be a risk when it comes to containing toxic chemicals,” she said.
“And you know, that just proves that this risk is unacceptable.”
White pointed to other notorious mining projects in the Yukon, such as the abandoned Faro, Wolverine and Minto mines – all of which are now under long-term government care – and also said that the heap leaching process used at the Eagle mine “has raised concerns in the past.”
“This cannot be the future of mining in the Yukon. It cannot continue like this,” she said.
When construction began on the mine site in 2017, Lewis Rifkind of the Yukon Conservation Society cited the heap leaching process as one of his concerns about the project. However, he said any environmental risks could be mitigated and controlled “as long as proper monitoring is done.”
