By Michelle Mandel The Oregonian 10/11/2002
It’s been nearly a year since Amanda Evans got the phone call from her father, Gary, saying he had liver cancer.
Soon after, she quit her job in Los Angeles and moved home to Hillsboro to be with her father in his final months. Gary, 61, died in February.
That’s when the daughter took action.
Evans, 32, blames her father’s death on the water he- and 25,000 other employees- drank while working at the former ViewMaster plant off Oregon 217 in Beaverton. In March 1998, the company’s private well was found to contain 320 tmes the allowable federal standard of trichloroethylene, or TCE, and industrial solvent thought to cause kidney and liver cancer, leukemia and other health problems.
Last spring, Evans formed an organization called Victims of TCE Exposure. At 5p.m. Sunday, the group is holding a fundraising drive and celebrity silent auction in the World Forestry Center’s Miller Hall. Tickets cost $50 or $100 and are available by calling 800-305-3133.
“I was so shocked about what was going on, I decided a documentary had to be made,” Evans a film art director , says of the TCE levels at the plant.
Jane Haley- Harris, president of the Oregon Center for Environmental Health, agrees.
“Very little has been done to address the grievances of what’s been done to these employees,” she says.
Evans wants her documentary to show how TCE poisoned hundreds, if not thousands, of ViewMaster employees.
“To get it done right, I’d like $50,000, but we’re going to make it with whatever money we get,” she says.