One worker says operations continued after heap leach failure in January
Some current and former employees at Victoria Gold’s Eagle Gold Mine in Yukon have spoken up about the lax safety culture at the workplace following the landslide in January.
The mine experienced a “significant” landslide early after a heap leach failure late in June.
That was the second landslide at the site just this year, according to a report from The Northern Miner.
A smaller failure happened in January on a stockpile that wasn’t being leached, according to the report.
Under safety regulations, employers must implement a safety stand-down, or pause in operations, following such an event. That, however, did not happen, according to one equipment operator.
“We drove down from the top of the pad (towards) the lunchroom,” the worker said in the report. “Before I got out of the truck, I asked (the mine manager) ‘is this a safety stand-down or is this a regular lunch?’ He said it’s a regular lunch. I said, ‘I don’t agree with that.’”
Another operator, who wasn’t working on the pad at the time, said there was no pause in operations.
“It’s true that the lock-out procedure didn’t happen there, everyone just went to lunch,” he said.
But the disregard for safety goes far beyond just that incident, according to the report.
“I would see workers constantly complain about specific safety issues,” said a former member of the health, safety and security department, who worked at Eagle for four years. “And it was just pushed off on the backburner. ‘Oh, we’ll get around to it. You know, we don’t have parts, we don’t have time.’”
Also, while drinking is prohibited at the Eagle gold mine site, drinking and drug use were tolerated, according to the report.
“In the garbage can I saw a whole bunch of beer cans and bottles and a couple bottles of whiskey at the camp by the incinerator,” another operator said in The Northern Miner report. “You’re not allowed to have booze there. It’s a dry camp.”
“Unless they were caught and tested, it was basically open range,” the former safety worker said. “A cocaine-addicted man came to me and said, ‘This is Disneyland for an addict like me.’ We just turned a blind eye to it because nobody wanted to dig into the deeper problem of how to control it.”
