Georgia-Pacific: Another Day, More Concerns

To Amber Garrett, it all happened so fast. "My world pretty much stopped when we found out my dad had cancer," she remembers. Ten months later, her dad, 62 year-old Bill Garrett, was gone. Now Amber grieves over what was lost. "I think what I miss most about him is that we would come up to me and call me `Sugah,`" she says with tears in her eyes. She also struggles to find the answers to the questions that still remain. "It`s really not a shock to me this story would come across. I think it`s probably far overdue," she says. Garrett was watching when a News 4 Arkansas investigation shed light on a lawsuit filed by workers at Georgia-Pacific-- the same company her father worked for in Fordyce for 40 years. She worries that work may be connected to the lung cancer that later killed him. "I think they look at safety issues now, but back then they didn`t," she says. Speaking for standards today, a corporate spokesperson tells us employee safety is a high priority, something that`s taken into consideration with every decision Georgia-Pacific makes. "Georgia-Pacific takes employee safety very, very seriously," says Greg Guest. "It`s a critical piece of our culture and foremost in everything we do." Amber, though, says she`s still left with questions. There are worries about what other workers may face in the future. "It makes me think they may not be sick now, but years later it could just appear like it did with [my dad]," she says. She also wonders what life would have been like if her dad was still alive. "I hate that he`s not going to be around," she says, crying. "That he can`t someday walk me down the aisle, see my kids and be with his wife who loved him very much."