‘Drug Disneyland’ part of lax safety culture in shadow of Victoria Gold accident, workers say
A landslide that’s stopped production at Victoria Gold’s (TSXV: VGCX) Eagle mine in the Yukon may have been inevitable due to the company’s weak approach to safety protocols, current and former employees say.
Individuals who approached The Northern Miner to share their experiences of working at Eagle, told of neglected incidents and repairs, attempts to subvert injury reports and widespread drug and alcohol use in a supposedly dry camp. They asked not to be named to avoid career repercussions.
“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.’”
The lax safety culture may have contributed to Victoria’s difficult position. With operations at Eagle suspended after the June 24 heap leach spill and landslide, the company faces C$232.5 million in debt payments, and no cash flow. The incident tanked Victoria’s share price by more than 85% during the last week of June. The single-asset company now has a market cap of C$54.1 million.
Victoria has issued three news releases since the accident. It has not responded to multiple requests for comment. The precise cause of the accident is being investigated.
“There was always an excuse why we couldn’t fix anything or make it safer,” the former safety staffer said. “It was always just pushed back, you know, production versus safety.”
Avoiding insurance claims
The workers agreed Victoria’s alleged safety negligence stands out in its approach towards Workers’ Compensation Board (WCB) claims.
When a worker was injured, the company was supposed to report the incident to the WCB. But instead of paying compensation costs, the worker would be kept on wages, told to stay home and company records wouldn’t show any injuries, the sources said.
“We were directed to send them computers and give them online training so they could stay at home and stay on the payroll, which wouldn’t show any time loss,” the former safety department member said.
The department holds less than a dozen guards, supervisors, emergency response technicians and paramedics, but it lost 14 people over three years from turnover.
“They were just fed up and moved onto different jobs,” he said.
A heavy equipment operator, who has worked at Victoria for more than two years, but who was injured more than a year ago, said the company avoids WCB claims to limit payments and to keep insurance rates from increasing. The details of his injuries are being withheld because he’s still employed by Victoria.
“I got injured there and they do pay you to keep you from WCB, but only for six or seven months, and then they said they don’t have the (technology) to accommodate you working from home, like administrative work or training work,” he said. “I’ve been fighting with the WCB and the company because they didn’t give me any support whatsoever.”
‘They went to lunch’
Last month’s accident was the second landslide to occur at Eagle this year, as the Yukon government confirmed in a news briefing in late June. The incident in January involved a smaller failure than the one in June and was on a stockpile that wasn’t being leached. In heap operations, ore pads are applied with a solution containing cyanide that separates gold from ore.
The equipment operator confirmed what another operator had told The Northern Miner in an interview last week about the aftermath of the January accident. Production continued after the slope failure even though by regulation a safety stand-down, or pause in operations, must follow such events.
“We drove down from the top of the pad (towards) the lunchroom,” he said. “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.
Drug and alcohol use
While drinking alcohol is prohibited at Eagle, one of the operators and the safety worker said drinking and drug use were tolerated.
“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,” the operator said. “You’re not allowed to have booze there. It’s a dry camp.”
Drug-testing only happened if there were metal-on-metal accidents involving machinery colliding with other machines, the safety department member said. Bags and clothing weren’t checked when staff came onto the site, and there were no further investigations after housekeepers gave security staff drug paraphernalia they found in the camp buildings.
“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.”
