Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The United States faces long-running border disputes over
water with its neighbor to the north, too. Canadian mining giant
Teck Cominco has been battling the state of Washington and mem-
bers of the Colville Confederated Tribes over pollution in the trans-
boundary Columbia River. Though the case involves pollution, the
real battle is whether U.S. environmental laws apply to a company
outside the boundaries of the United States. In March 2009, a fed-
eral court ruled that Teck Cominco must pay the Colvilles more
than $1 million in legal fees in the case. Legal wrangling aside, it's
the water resource that suffers as a result.
For years, Teck Cominco's metal smelters discharged slag
(fi ne-grained waste material) into the Columbia River from its
plant in Trail, British Columbia, just upstream from the U.S.
border. The practice stopped more than a decade ago, but years
of slag remain upstream from the Grand Coulee Dam in Lake
Roosevelt and are a source of what both Washington State and the
Colville tribes say is pollution. Teck Cominco unsuccessfully tried
to get the suit dismissed on the grounds that U.S. environmen-
tal law did not apply to it. The case went all the way to the U.S.
Supreme Court, which declined to hear the appeal. The company
has agreed to spend millions of dollars to study the effects of the
slag. Meanwhile, the slag, the water problems, and the dispute
remain.
Then there are the Great Lakes and their basin, which includes
parts of eight states and two Canadian provinces (Illinois, Indiana,
Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,
and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec). The lakes'
massive water supply seems to tempt the entire United States and
some other thirsty parts of the world. Myriad schemes for taking
water out of the lakes and towing, piping, draining, or shipping it to
points around the world led, in part, to the fi nal approval in 2008 of
the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact
(the Great Lakes Basin compact), touted as the way to protect, pre-
serve, and conserve the lakes and their basin. That agreement pro-
vides a framework for managing and protecting Great Lakes water
resources that includes a ban on most diversion of water from the
Great Lakes Basin (the area that drains into the Great Lakes). Time
will tell whether the compact works.
