The court is applying US law to clean up a US site that happens to have a Canadian source of pollution. It does not seek to reach over the border and force Teck Cominco to address contamination of Canadian water, soil or sediment. Canada does have a statute that is similar to CERCLA. In fact, for the past several years the Canadian government, under the Canadian version of CERCLA, has been conducting, north of the border, the rough equivalent of the investigation EPA ordered Teck Cominco to perform south of the border. Unfortunately, Canadian law is not intended to address, and does not apply to, contamination located wholly within the US, even though the source is a facility in Canada. That is exactly what CERCLA is intended to do. CERCLA was drafted to address the problem of the legacy of illegal or abandoned hazardous waste disposal sites, and to force those responsible for those sites to pay for their cleanup. Teck Cominco does not dispute that over the course of nearly 90 years, with the blessing of the Canadian government, it discharged more than 15 million tons of slag (which contains hazardous metals including lead, mercury, zinc, cadmium, copper and arsenic) directly into the Columbia River. The Columbia River carried the mess largely out of Canada -- which satisfied the Canadian regulators because all they are concerned with under their environmental statutes is the 10 miles between Trail and the Canadian border, and saved Teck Cominco millions of dollars in waste disposal costs -- and into the US, where it remains. How is it any different from Teck Cominco having loaded that slag onto a truck, driven it over the border, and dumped it into Lake Roosevelt? It simply used the river instead, and now it will be held to the same standard to which any other polluter of US resources is held.

Mrs. Capt. Dan, Esq. ("close personal friend")