Victoria Gold directed to create, implement new water management plans for Eagle Gold mine site

A Yukon mining officer has ordered Victoria Gold to produce two new water management plans for its Eagle Gold mine site — one for intercepting groundwater, and the other, with the spring melt in mind. 

In an inspector's direction issued this week, natural resources officer Russell McDiarmid directed Victoria Gold to create and implement a groundwater interception plan by Dec. 15, with requirements including the identification of all interception infrastructure and information on the volume and quality of water that will be produced from each interception site. 

The other plan, meanwhile, is due April 15 and must focus on managing both surface and groundwater so that, among other things, there's adequate storage to control freshet run-off and no "uncontrolled discharge" of untreated water. 

As Victoria Gold is in receivership, receiver PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), who has been managing the company's affairs since August, will be responsible for actually doing the work. 

The direction is a legal order and is the fourth one officials have issued to the company since the heap leach failure at its mine in June. An estimated four million tonnes of ore being treated with cyanide solution slid off the heap, with about half the material leaving containment. 

The storage and treatment of contaminated water has been a serious issue ever since. 

According to PwC's recent application for an emergency water licence amendment, there were approximately 508 million litres of cyanide-contaminated water — enough to fill 203 Olympic-sized swimming pools — being held in storage ponds on-site as of Nov. 4. There were also an additional 250 million litres being re-circulated onto the heap leach facility, and more contaminated water being stored in the in-heap pond. 

The volume of water, however, is growing at an estimated rate of two million litres per day due to regular inflow, and crews must also intercept and store up to three million litres of groundwater daily. 

The director's inspection says that based on those estimates and the current inability to properly treat and discharge water on-site, storage capacity will be exceeded by February. 

However, that forecast doesn't take into account the estimated 500 million litres of additional water that will also need to be stored and treated when snow and ice melt in the spring. 

PwC's emergency application requests that it temporarily be permitted to discharge water that's "non-acutely toxic" but contains higher levels of contaminants than currently allowed in order to avoid overwhelming the storage capacity. The firm has also been upgrading the on-site water treatment plant so that it can treat cyanide, but that work is still underway.