Still No Victories for Victoria Gold
Anyone who follows mining has likely heard of the environmental disaster that has occurred recently at Victoria Gold’s Eagle mine near Mayo, Yukon Territory in northwestern Canada. Anyone new to the space, welcome to the jungle.
Yukon Territory is…. Was? A mining powerhouse. Home to the Klondike gold rush in the 1896 where… more money was made selling tents and shovels than gold, nevertheless putting Yukon and Canada on the global mining map, and since churning out mines producing gold, silver, copper, lead and zinc, with …. Until now, buy in from the local indigenous nation.
This disaster has certainly set Yukon back. We are following the story closely.
We were sad to see the company had been so very quiet until this update. Communication is always part of the solution, and silence part of the problem. Companies must be continuous, transparent and frank in their disclosure. Not just of their discoveries, but their disasters as well. Victoria was an under capitalized single asset producer, an island. They must clean up if they are going to survive.
The real question though is why. Why did this happen? Canada has some of the strictest environmental regulations in the world. This is not artisanal mining. Some research would reveal an initial location for the leach pad was suggested, and suggestion was ignored favoring the incumbent location, for cost savings. Of course, follow the money. Major events are never caused by a single fault, but by a web of potential...
We will watch closely to see what the full cost of that decision will be. Sadly it make take decades for this to play out, and in the mean time, mining, the backbone of the Yukon economy, is … shaken to its literal cores.