The fate of Eagle hangs on the environment & economy
Can the Yukon economy take the economic hit? Right now even through all this horrible stuff Yukon staff (my bet) are runnung senario's of what happens if the Eagle is out of the loop as in lost revenue and all the people it employs, directly and indirectly.
This was done on the Faro mine repeatedly. GDP of Faro was like 60% (if I remember), Eagle is 10%. In the intervening years the basis of the economy has changed but it's probably a consideration.
The Casino Mine is waiting in the wings, right now everyone is so scared of a another disaster it's not on the table.
Keno Hill (HL) has two active mines and is producing (HL is the last one standing). But seriously it is a smallish mine. (no offence) and there are two divisions (Left over Alexco co's).....) doing remedial work, so I think they will remain operational as they are fufilling the requirements of YTG, EMR and FN. And they are adding to the economy.
There are a bunch of smaller placer, etc. operations, we won't get into that.
Just say the estimate of 50m$ to move the slide (forget how for a moment, it's spoil/scrape) is correct.
That estimate probably included some of the other ongoing tasks related to solution. Is there 50m kicking around for that, of course.
Now I do not think judging by the photo's that anyone would consider taking the slide and moving it onto the remaining HLP location. Spending 50m$ It's not helpfull to anything, it's a mess of solution, ore and foreign debris. Clean and abandon.
As from what I read cut into the old spoil in the gulch from the old timers.
So get the wells, sumps, horzontal vacumns, ppols and liners... in and clean up it up so it's safe. It's then like a landslide, landslide unless they are obstructing something or are a danger are just left alone.
The heap say it's damaged ;) I beleive in a report, the pumps and pipes where janked out of their nice happy homes and are now in the slide debris?
Pprobably a bunch of emiter trubing and liner is now also looking at the big pile of spoil and of course pizo sensors and all the other electronics are saying what the frak happened. That's junk.
So what's left? Well the remainder of the ore on the HLP some stabile, some just hanging around. And other infrastructure, the ore, conveyor and so forth. There seems ot be some confusion as to how much of the large equiptment is left? Can the remainder on the HLP be processed, maybe but the HLP needs to be repaired, might be so expensive it wil be cleaned up (solution nutralized) and abandoned. Depends on a lot of factors not relating to the gold, FN, EMR, YTG ans so forth, they may not want to re-open, but some of that may depend on the economic survival of The Yukon short term.
A big part of the whole mining scenario in The Yukon, is prospecting, creating juniors (which takes forever to get viable if at all) in the meantime the economy is sucking up cash from shareholders on all things relating to mining, equiptment, jobs, flights, drilliing, accomodation, transport and the list goes on and on. Now with First Nations looking at what the hell is happening recently they are going to band by band start saying "No more, Full Stop" untill we get this sorted by YTG, EMR, any company that wants to do business with us Tthey have vast say on access, useage and so forth.
The analysis will be can we afford to let this mine be coffined. We already have to clean it up. We do all the remediation and still no revenue. How much gold is still available. Can we rebuild the mine and still show net revenue? Can the HLP be repaired (now there's big one, it's the engine) and waht is the cost of that? And so forth.
Is gold being produced while all the immediate environmental remediation is going on. The process would require equiptment, labour and I seriously dount the EMR and all the people on site wouldn't have noticed at the very least ther eis additional payroll and remittances to CRA for income taxes, WCB payments and all the other wonderfull stuff that businesses are saddled with.
But of course mayby someones hard at work smelting. <wink>
So at the end of the day whether to just clean it up or get it operational will end up on the cost vs return, it always does!
in my opinion only
Best