Treated effluent from Eagle mine discharging into nearby Haggart Creek.
Experts working with 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.
With the heap leach pad downed, experts say a toxic soup of sodium cyanide and other contaminants — up to 300,000 litres of solution, according to the Yukon government — was released in the initial slide. Since then, they say, more of it has been draining. 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."
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. Even if there was more reagent, there'd be another problem of near equal proportion, he said. When peroxide reacts with cyanide,and cyanate. Over a couple days, the latter will, too, become ammonia, Mohamm said. Ammonia is likewise toxic to plants and animals.
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.at Haggart Creek didn't show any cyanide. Still, they urged people to avoid drinking water or angling downstream from the waterway.
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. "It didn't just go away. We know it flowed into the valley and, therefore, it's in the groundwater," he said.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.
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