Victoria Gold sues engineers in Eagle tailings release
2026-06-22 19:01 ET - Street Wire
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by Mike Caswell
Victoria Gold Corp., former operator of the Eagle mine in Yukon, has filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court of British Columbia against engineering firm JDS Energy & Mining Inc. over a catastrophic tailings failure at the mine. Victoria Gold says that JDS Energy, which managed construction of the tailings storage, was negligent in designing the operation. Among other things, JDS failed to properly account for the effects of cold temperatures on the tailings, Victoria Gold claims.
The allegations are contained in a notice of claim filed at the Vancouver courthouse on Friday, June 19. The lawsuit was brought on behalf of Victoria Gold by its court-appointed receiver, PricewaterhouseCoopers Inc., which has been managing the company's assets since August, 2024. The sole defendant is JDS Energy, which provided engineering and construction management to the mine over a period of more than 10 years, the suit states.
The lawsuit arises entirely from the well-publicized failure of the tailings storage at the Eagle mine. On June 24, 2024, the heap leach pad at the mine suffered a landslide involving four million tonnes of material, some of which was deposited into the nearby Dublin Gulch Valley. A government engineer later estimated that two million tonnes of material, including 300 million litres of cyanide solution, had escaped containment. The failure led to a complete shutdown of all production at the mine.
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JDS Energy and Mining Inc is a seemingly well-respected Vancouver-based company which does not seem to have a history of litigation.
Rocketreach says that its 2026 revenue is $20.5 million
The Mount Polley breach (Imperial Metals Inc) occured in 2014 and took 10 years to settle.
As Mike wrote on 2024-12-10 (https://www.stockwatch.com/News/Item/Z-C!III-3631952/C/III)
For Imperial Metals, the charges represent the latest in a long string of litigation arising from the failure of the Mount Polley dam. The company previously sued two engineering firms, Knight Piesold Ltd. and AMEC Earth and Environmental, claiming that they were responsible for the failure. Knight Piesold had designed the dam in the 1990s and had confirmed in many subsequent reports that it was safe, the suit stated.
For their part, the engineering firms denied any wrongdoing. Knight Piesold said that it had warned Imperial more than once about the condition of the dam. AMEC, meanwhile, blamed Imperial for the failure. It said that Imperial discharged far more water into the Mount Polley tailings pond than the pond was meant to hold. AMEC claimed that it had specifically warned Imperial about the issue 10 months before the dam failed.
In the end, the lawsuit never went to trial, as both engineering firms settled out of court. One agreed to pay $108-million, while the other settled for an undisclosed amount. The individual engineers who worked on the project were later fined a combined $226,500 by their regulatory body, the Engineers and Geoscientists British Columbia.
Imperial Metals also sued its insurer, Factory Mutual Insurance Company, seeking reimbursement for losses it suffered from the dam failure. Imperial claimed that it had an insurance policy providing up to $250-million in coverage. The judge, however, found that a clause in the policy limited payouts related to tailings dams to $10-million.
Posted by halcrow at 2026-06-22 20:30