Columbia River
The Columbia drains an area of about . Its drainage basin covers nearly all of Idaho, large portions of British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington, ultimately all of Montana west of the Continental Divide, and small portions of Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada; the total area is similar to the size of France. Roughly of the river's length and 85 percent of its drainage basin are in the US. The Columbia is the twelfth-longest river and has the sixth-largest drainage basin in the United States. In Canada, where the Columbia flows for and drains , the river ranks 23rd in length, and the Canadian part of its basin ranks 13th in size among Canadian basins. 
The Columbia shares its name with nearby places, such as British Columbia, as well as with landforms and bodies of water.
Kootenay River
The Columbia Basin is noted for its spring floods, major flood years were 1876, 1894, 1948 and 1964. As recently as the mid-1960s, the upper Columbia and Kootenay rivers in British Columbia were still free-flowing and unaffected by dams and reservoirs, resulting in the 1948 Vanport Oregon flood. The uncontrolled discharge past the Canada-U.S. border created problems for electricity generation in the US, and Canada also wanted to utilize the Columbia river for the production of hydroelectric power. Negotiated in 1961 between the governments of the two countries, the Columbia River Treaty attempted to ratify these problems. Construction of the first three of the four dams authorized by the treaty—Mica, Keenleyside and Duncan—was implemented in 1964. Of the four dams, the first two are on the Columbia, the third is on the Duncan River, a tributary of the Kootenay, and the fourth Libby, on the Kootenay River proper. However, operation of the dams has led to environmental problems in both rivers because they have caused unnatural flow fluctuations, blocked fish migration, flooded fertile agricultural land, and forced over 2,000 people to relocate.