RE:RE:It is hard to fathom...In the interim, would you settle for a litttle bit of aerial view expert opinion?
Victoria Gold must rapidly secure landslide site: expert - MINING.COM Clearly VGCX management has bigger things to worry about yet than fielding calls from reporters and investors. The good news is that the Mayo weather forecast is for decent weather give or take a few light showers into the later part of next week, so I say leave them alone and let them do what they need to prevent this thing from becoming any worse than it already is.
And on a side note, it appears from the before and after photos that the ore slide on the leach pad slid over the barrier (perhaps not taking it out?) and the contaminated material that the company stated escaped containment appears to be on the outer side of the pad barrier wall, while there's also slide material still on the pad side of the wall that's covering the barrier wall. So until that's cleaned up it's probably hard to say if the barrier wall was wiped out or if the slide material hit the barrier wall and shot up and over the wall (kinda like an snow avalanche effect). How much contaminated material actually went over the wall is probably not easy to determine if that material then triggered the slide and mixed with slope material on the way down. But you would think that the contaminated material that slid down is at least somewhat limited to and contained within the flat area immediately below.
Apparently the onsite team quickly built a dam to contain the solution and has been pumping that solution to a holding pond so thank God someone was thinking and acting fast to help mitigate the environmental aspect of this incident.
If I had to guess what caused this slide (and this is just a guess so feel free to bow out here if you wish), I believe the pad liner has an initial layer of sand and small round rock to enhance solution drainage and the the mined ore is eventually stacked on top of that. And, if that's the case, my guess is that the round rock / gravel acted like marbles on a floor and someone unknowingly walking on them. The small rock base works just fine and normally stays in place until you stack a heaping (30 meter high) pile of ore on top of it. No problem on most of the pad but when you get near the bottom end of the pad where the slope is steeper (engineered like this on purpose for solution drainage), well the stacked ore once heavy enough starts to slide and the rest is history.
So let's just say this ends up being the cause, then who's fault is it? The pad is built to engineer design so is the worker stacking the ore to blame because; well, they should know better? I'd say not, they're not engineers and probably stack similar piles of ore all over the pad, never even thinking about something like this occurring. Is VGCX management to blame? They didn't engineer design the leach pads, so again I'd say no. So since we need a head to roll, who's head should roll?
Hindsight is a great thing, foresight is even better. I'm guessing that if VGCX can get past this and resume operations and if my theory is what actually occurred that this will never happen again at Victoria Gold or any other heap leach operation because like the many engineering failures in history, they learn and move on. Just thank God no one was killed!
You ever watch the History Channel shows on Engineering Failures? Well, if the pad base material is as I believe, maybe Victoria Gold can get the History Channel folks to add this to their list of Engineering Failures (again if my theory is correct) and raise a few millions to help fix this.
HB77