Mine water treatment and management firm, BQE Water Inc., has discharged more than 600,000 m³ of treated water into the environment under its contract with PricewaterhouseCoopers Inc., the court-appointed receiver of Victoria Gold Corp., for emergency treatment at the Eagle Gold Mine in Yukon.
The heap leach failure and landslide occurred at the Victoria Gold Corporation’s Eagle Mine on June 24, 2024, sliding nearly half of an estimated four million tonnes of ore treated with cyanide solution off the heap and out of a containment area.
BQE Water has led emergency treatment efforts at the mine since September 2024. The project has since addressed multiple sources of contamination, including heap leach solution, spring melt water entering storage ponds, and contaminated groundwater.
BQE Water developed and implemented a treatment process that combined existing plant equipment, rental units, and newly constructed ponds. Engineering, lab testing, procurement, operations, and toxicological analysis were conducted in parallel to enable the timely and safe discharge of treated water.
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“Implementing the emergency treatment system in extreme winter conditions with off-the-shelf equipment and achieving consistent production of non-toxic effluent was a major challenge,” announced David Kratochvil, president and CEO of BQE Water.
Effluent quality has been continuously tracked against metrics developed by BQE Water and verified through daily third-party laboratory testing, including toxicity and chemical analyses.
With the contract now extended to October 31, 2025, BQE Water says it will continue operating the emergency system until the site’s contaminated water inventory is substantially reduced, which is anticipated by the end of Q3. The company will also prepare a decommissioning plan and a winterization plan for treatment infrastructure, to be carried out subject to the receiver’s approval before demobilizing.
Proceeds from gold sales during recovery efforts will be used to help fund ongoing work at the site and offset public funds being spent on remediation efforts, the Yukon government announced in July.
