'Every minute matters': Experts with first-hand accounts at Victoria Gold mine disclose gravity of problems
The worst is yet to come, warn those working with Na-Cho Nyäk Dun
Experts working with the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun who have witnessed the fallout at Victoria Gold's Eagle mine near Mayo, Yukon, say systems on-site are so severely compromised that damage to the land and water is all but inevitable.
What they describe is a system rendered mostly inoperable, with each affected piece elevating risks to the environment — every day.
"This is not a disaster that has happened. This is a disaster that is happening. Every minute matters," Farzad Mohamm, a water treatment expert and chemical engineer, who visited the site, told CBC News.
On June 24, part of the Eagle mine failed and a massive rock slide involving roughly four million tonnes of material cleaved off a large piece of the facility where gold is extracted from ore using a chemical process called cyanide heap leach. Estimates put the amount of ore stacked on the heap leach pad — which functions as a giant industrial percolator — at nearly four times what was lost in the slide.
With the heap leach pad downed, experts say a toxic soup of sodium cyanide and other contaminants — up to 300,000 cubic metres of solution, according to the Yukon government — was released in the initial slide. Since then, they say, more of it has been draining.
"We've lost about 50 per cent of that cyanide already," Mohamm said. "That other 50 per cent, we don't want it to come down.
"There are some very harsh realities that we have to accept at this point."
Cyanide is a naturally occurring chemical, a compound of which is found in things like stone fruit pits. At high doses, it can be lethal to aquatic species and people.
The First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun has called the event "the region's most recent and potentially catastrophic mining failure."
In an email to CBC News, Chief Dawna Hope said citizens need time "to digest and grieve for our lands, waters, wildlife, and fish, our culture and ultimately the identity of our people resulting from the disaster."
The Yukon government has held three briefings with reporters since the failure. John Streicker, the minister whose portfolio includes mining, has said water samples taken from locations near the mine have come back positive for cyanide and that levels in a nearby free flowing creek "could affect fish."
In an email to CBC News on Friday, a cabinet spokesperson said there "isn't much to share beyond what was covered in previous technical briefings."
Experts with the First Nation's emergency response team, which includes Mohamm, tell a different — more nuanced — story.
They warn the worst is yet to come. A "plume" or "rolling wave" of contaminated groundwater is heading toward Haggart Creek, which experts said represents the bellwether of impacts to the environment. Nearly one kilometre away from the edge of the debris field of the heap leach pad, the watercourse provides habitat for fish like Arctic grayling and salmon, which are starting to enter the Yukon River drainage on the Canadian side and whose numbers have been for years declining.
The creek also flows into the South McQuesten River, near which many residents of the area live. From there, it flows into the Stewart and Yukon Rivers.
The experts included in this story say without immediately putting plans in motion, it may already be too late to thwart environmental harms, the seriousness of which will take years to fully comprehend.
Cyanide isn't the only problem
Mohamm told CBC News since the slide, pumping capacity at the heap leach facility has been disabled, storage space for surface water is limited to the degree it could run out "in a matter of days," if it hasn't already, and there's not enough reagent — hydrogen peroxide — available to break down cyanide.
Mohamm said consultants with the First Nation and Yukon government are working together on various emergency plans. Much of what has been supplied by the company, he said, has been on a per request basis. That includes how much reagent is on site.
Victoria Gold likely has enough of the compound on-site to treat roughly one per cent of the surface water, said Mohamm, adding the company is pouring peroxide in two collection ponds.
Mohamm said the company is dosing 15 litres of solution per hour. That's in comparison to roughly 20 million litres — roughly 10 Olympic-sized swimming pools — per day it's working to capture in the available ponds.
Even if there was more reagent, there'd be another problem of near equal proportion, he said. When peroxide reacts with cyanide, it converts into ammonia and cyanate. Over a couple days, the latter will, too, become ammonia, Mohamm said. Ammonia is likewise toxic to plants and animals.
"How much ammonia are you going to end up with?" Mohamm said. "Exactly the same amount of cyanide that you had in your water. You are looking at a very high concentration of ammonia, even if you destroy all of your cyanide.
"There is no plan for ammonia. There is no infrastructure for ammonia."
In an email sent to CBC News on Monday just before 12 p.m., he said storage ponds were full.
The heap leach facility sits above Haggart Creek. A valley lies between. Then there's gravity.
Mohamm said the cyanide solution will reach the waterway.
"It's going to daylight in the creek," he said. "That's also a matter of weeks, if not days away. The flows are going to go down, the concentrations are going to go down [because they will dilute], but it's going to be there. It's going to be there for a long time, and it's going to require water treatment for a long time. Water management for a long time."
"The leach solution is orders and orders of magnitude higher concentration than what is allowed and certainly immediately toxic to anything."
Tests run on rainbow trout
The latest news release from Victoria Gold states most infrastructure on-site wasn't impacted, including the containment ponds and the water treatment plant.
Cyanide has already been detected in Haggart Creek. Earlier this month, Streicker said the concentration in the water was 0.04 milligrams per litre. Tyler Williams, a water resources scientist with the territorial government, said water collected on June 25 and 26 from Dublin Gulch and Haggart Creek, respectively, was used to run tests on juvenile rainbow trout, which were observed for four days to see if they died or experienced some change in behaviour.
"[The tests] showed no effects to fish and no fish mortalities," he said.
British Columbia water quality guidelines state 0.01 mg/L can cause adverse impacts to fish, but that variables, including species and lifestage, can affect to what degree. The report states cyanide levels greater than 0.2 mg/L "are rapidly fatal to most fish species," with salmonids — the family of fish including salmon, trout and whitefish — being most sensitive to the effects of cyanide.
About a week ago, government officials said additional water samples at Haggart Creek didn't show any cyanide. Still, they urged people to avoid drinking water or angling downstream from the waterway.
In a recent statement posted to its website, Victoria Gold said there was a "trace" detection of cyanide downstream in the creek.
"Other than this one sample, there has been no other detection of cyanide in final results at any of the water quality objective sampling locations," states the release, which goes on to say the company remains within the parameters of its water licence.
The Yukon government has ordered Victoria Gold to come up with plans to install a system capable of intercepting and storing groundwater located in the valley. The territory has also directed the company to, this month, build two additional lined water storage facilities capable of holding, in total, 150,000 cubic metres of contaminated water.
The company hasn't made public its plans to ameliorate what's happened at the mine. However, the government has confirmed to CBC News those plans exist.
Bill Slater, an independent environmental consultant also part of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun's emergency response team, said the slide dashed the company's contingency plans for managing the scale of what happened at the heap leach facility.
"Those systems are critical," he said. "They also lost access to the backup storage pond, because the spillway was destroyed. So the pumping capacity was destroyed, the spillway was blocked."
Slater said about five per cent of solution was lost in the initial slide. As for the remainder, he said it's been draining for weeks into the valley, though it hasn't been detected at collection sites.
"It didn't just go away. We know it flowed into the valley and, therefore, it's in the groundwater," he said.
Not enough storage
Slater, who has more than 30 years of experience working in water management in the Yukon, said heap leach facilities aren't designed to store all the cyanide solution present in the system. Because of the high expense, operators often forgo the capacity, settling on managing risks in other ways, he said. At Victoria Gold, Slater added, that looks like storage for three days of pump failure.
"We've lost the pumps," he said.
"There never was storage capacity for all of that leach solution."
Previous placer mining activity in Dublin Gulch, the valley running down to Haggart Creek, has impacted the density of soils, Slater said. Now, they're coarse, and that could mean the leach solution is relatively unencumbered by the earth.
"We don't currently have capacity, nor do I believe we have adequate plans in place from the company to collect the groundwater, to store it and to treat it, and all three of those are going to be needed."
Slater said the contaminated groundwater could reach the creek in two to three weeks, and it's not clear where the solution will surface.
No one with Victoria Gold has spoken publicly since the mine failure. People who sit on the company's board deferred comment to president and CEO John McConnell. McConnell didn't respond to multiple requests for comment. Three text messages sent to McConnell's cellphone were marked as read.
'We have a huge problem'
Cord Hamilton, a civil, geotechnical and hydrotechnical engineer who's also been hired by the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun as part of its emergency response team, draws a comparison between the failure at Eagle and the 2014 Mount Polley disaster in British Columbia that saw roughly 25 million cubic metres of water and tailings effluent flow into surrounding waterways. It was the largest tailings spill in Canadian history.
"Ultimately, we will see this event as being more significant, in our context, than Mount Polley was to British Columbia," he said.
"We're dealing with much worse material."
Behind the scenes, Hamilton said, communication from Victoria Gold has looked like the passing of papers — letters in the form of daily reports sent to the Yukon government.
"An emergency gets people in the room exchanging views, having dialogue and collaboratively, saying, 'OK, we know that we have to make some difficult decisions,'" Hamilton said.
In the days following the slide, government officials said Victoria Gold quickly built two containment dams, which the head of major mines for territory at the time said "appear to have contained any solution" on site. On Friday, the company said in a statement it is sampling water from several locations around the site on a daily basis.
While Hamilton acknowledged work like this, he said it falls short.
"We have a huge problem. If you are knowledgeable about this type of thing and the project, you know that now you have a semi trailer loaded with dangerous goods going down a steep hill with no brakes and no steering."
Hamilton said how significant the impacts are will depend on how hard the company and governments come at them.
"We're already going far too slow. The frustration is there are things that could be happening today … to minimize the harm, and do it safely.
"This is a time for transparency and exchange of information at a high level. That's not happening. This is not the time for laying blame. This is the time to respond."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With files from Jackie Hong