A year after the Eagle mine failure, questions remain about Yukon's mining future

To Frank Patterson, a First Nations elder in Mayo, Yukon, last year's catastrophic failure at the nearby Eagle gold mine was not a total surprise.

"It was devastating," he said. "And you know, anybody that went in there could see something would happen someday."

It was one year ago, on the morning of June 24, 2024, that the Eagle mine went in a matter of moments from being a celebrated centrepiece of the territory's resource industry to an expensive environmental disaster that is still not fully understood.   

The failure at the Eagle mine also gave another black eye to the territory's mining industry, which has seen its share of large and costly mine failures and bankruptcies over the years. Some people are wondering what kind of future the industry has in the territory. 

The slide at the mine's heap leach facility released hundreds of millions of litres of toxic cyanide solution into the environment and immediately halted operations at what was then the Yukon's largest operating hard-rock mine. Within weeks, and at the Yukon government's request, a court-appointed receiver took over the company, Victoria Gold, and its assets. 

Emergency remediation work to contain the damage at the site and in the surrounding area is ongoing. Groundwater is being pumped and treated to remove any cyanide, and the territory's mines minister admits it's going to take "a long time before you get rid of all the cyanide." The cost of remediation so far has been more than $200 million.

"It's taxpayers cleaning up, just like Faro, Whitehorse, BYG in Carmacks, you name it ... You know, it's just taxpayers are paying for the cleanup, and those guys friggin' get up and run away," said Patterson, who's from the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun. The Eagle mine is within the First Nation's traditional territory, and the area affected by the slide is where Patterson says he once learned about his traditional culture, from his elders. 

Patterson feels mistakes were made right from the get-go with Victoria Gold. He believes that his First Nation made a bad agreement with the company and should have involved elders more in the decision-making. Once the company got what it needed, he argues, "they shut the doors" on the First Nation.

"We were not allowed up there. They gated it off. They put security there, they put their camp in there, and they just did whatever they wanted to do," Patterson said. 

Patterson says he's not against mining. He knows it's still the territory's main industry, as it has been for more than a century. But he believes things need to change, especially when it comes to approving mines and monitoring their operations. 

"The way Victoria Gold did it, it was greed. Pure greed," he said.

The exact cause of the slide is still not clear. In August, the territorial government appointed an independent review board to investigate what happened by looking at the design, construction, operation, maintenance and monitoring of the heap leach facility. Heap leaching is a method of extracting gold from stacked layers of ore using a cyanide solution. 

The results of that review are expected in the coming days.

Speaking to CBC News last week, Yukon's Mines Minister John Streicker said understanding the cause of the slide will help prevent anything similar happening again. It will also determine what the ongoing remediation will look like at Eagle mine site, and whether or not the mine could eventually be reopened.