BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana has received a $500,000 check as part of Temple Inland’s sentencing for polluting the Pearl River in 2011 with illegal discharges from its Bogalusa paper mill that killed thousands of fish.

Equipment malfunctioned at the mill, which makes containerboard, allowing an untreated plume of a substance known as black liquor to flow into the river in August 2011. Black liquor isn’t toxic, but it sucked up all the oxygen in the river as it decayed, suffocating more than 160,000 fish and more than 430,000 freshwater mussels.

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