In shadow of Victoria Gold accident, workers claim lax safety culture at site

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, confirming what a heavy equipment operator had previously said. 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’ Safety and Compensation Board (WSCB) claims.

When a worker was injured, the company was supposed to report the incident to the WSCB. 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, claimed the company avoids WSCB 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 WSCB, 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 WSCB and the company because they didn’t give me any support whatsoever.”

But WSCB spokesperson Heather Avery said in response to emailed questions that the board is aware that claims for compensation benefits were received by injured workers, and that Victoria Gold accommodated the workers’ injuries and continued to pay their salary. When employers continue paying the salaries of injured workers, WSCB would reimburse them to the employer.

“There is no benefit for employers to suppress claims in the Yukon,” she said.

“The number of claims for compensation at any individual employer does not impact their rates,” she added. “When a worker is injured and a claim is submitted, the Claimant Services branch works with the employer to determine the best approach for the injured worker on a case-by-case basis (including accommodating the injured worker with alternate work).”

‘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. The sources, who worked at the site as far back as four years ago and as recently as the day of the accident, said they never had bags and clothing checked when they arrived on site. They said they had heard about drug-sniffing dogs, but didn’t see them.

The former health and safety worker said 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,” he said. “We just turned a blind eye to it because nobody wanted to dig into the deeper problem of how to control it.”

Note: The Northern Miner has recently reviewed its editorial policy regarding the use of quotes from unnamed sources. As a result, we have removed a comment used in a previous version of this story that was attributed to a third party.