solidifying the Appellate Court's holding that Teck is subject to U.S. jurisdiction even though it is a Canadian company. The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation filed a lawsuit against Teck Cominco in 2004, claiming the company had dumped 140,000 tons of slag directly into rivers adjacent to its Trail smelter between 1896 and 1995, polluting the surface water, ground water and sediment of the upper Columbia River and Lake Roosevelt with hazardous metals including arsenic, cadmium, mercury, lead, copper and zinc. The Trail smelter was also the site of a lead spill into the Columbia River on May 28, 2008. A September 2012 Globe and Mail article reported that the day the 2012 trial, "Canadian mining giant Teck Resources Ltd." had admitted in a U.S. court that effluent from its smelter in southeast British Columbia ha[d] polluted the Columbia River in Washington state for more than a century." The agreement, reached on the eve of the trial initiated by the Colville Confederated Tribes, stipulates that some hazardous materials in the slag discharged from Teck's smelter in Trail, B.C., ended up in the Upper Columbia River south of the border. In his 2018 ruling in Pakootas, Michel and Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation v. Teck Cominco Metals, the United States District Judge for the District of Oregon, Michael J. McShane, agreed with the lower courts against Teck, and fined Teck US$8 million for pollution. The company was fined $2.2 million in 2023. Selenium contamination According to a March 8, 2021 article in The Narwhal, concerns have been raised about selenium pollution leaching from Teck Resources' Elk Valley open pit coal mines' waste rock, which is upstream from the Lake Koocanusa water system. Lake Koocanusa is in both British Columbia, Canada and Montana, United States. A September 24, 2020 Montana Department of Environmental Quality presentation to the Board of Environmental Review Meeting, reported that the 95% of the selenium coming into Lake Koocanusa originates from the Elk River "which has been contaminated by current and historic coal mining in the Elk Valley." By September 2020, the average selenium levels in Lake Koocanusa were 1 part per billion, while Montana had established new standards for selenium of 0.8 parts per billion. Because of the high bioaccumulation of selenium in fish, excessive levels of selenium in an aquatic ecosystem has implications for human health. In the spring of 2020, Teck Resources had