AFFF Firefighting Foam and Cancer: The Military's PFAS Problem

The U.S. military used aqueous film-forming foam — AFFF — at virtually every air installation in the country for more than 50 years. It worked extraordinarily well as a fire suppressant. It also saturated the groundwater beneath hundreds of bases with PFAS concentrations that, in many cases, exceed EPA health advisory levels by orders of magnitude. The veterans and civilians who lived and worked on those bases are now being diagnosed with cancer at rates that researchers and litigators are calling a public health emergency.

AFFF History: How Firefighting Foam Became a PFAS Vector

AFFF was not a consumer product that slipped under regulatory review. It was a deliberate military technology developed in the 1960s by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in partnership with 3M Company. The goal was to create a foam that could suppress fuel fires on aircraft carriers — a critical operational need in an era of jet aircraft with large fuel loads operating from enclosed ship decks.

The film-forming properties of AFFF — its ability to spread across a fuel surface as a coherent, smothering layer — required a class of chemicals called fluorosurfactants. PFOS-based fluorosurfactants, synthesized by 3M using a manufacturing process called electrochemical fluorination, delivered the performance the Navy needed.

The Navy adopted AFFF in 1967. By the 1970s, AFFF was standard at U.S. Air Force bases worldwide for aircraft crash response. By the 1980s, it was in use at municipal airports, industrial facilities, oil refineries, and marine terminals. Hangar drains, fire training pits, and crash response areas across hundreds of military installations became chronic AFFF application zones.

Here's the environmental problem. AFFF doesn't disappear. It soaks into the soil. The PFAS compounds in AFFF are highly water-soluble and highly resistant to degradation. They move through soil into groundwater. Groundwater that was, in many cases, used as the drinking water source for bases and surrounding communities.

3M manufactured PFOS-based AFFF ingredients from approximately 1970 until 2002, when the company voluntarily phased out PFOS production after its own internal research showed persistent environmental contamination. But 3M didn't stop selling AFFF formulations or notify the military of the contamination risk. And the foam that had already been applied remained in the ground.

700+ Contaminated Military Bases

In 2016, the Department of Defense began systematically testing groundwater at military installations for PFAS. The results, released in stages between 2016 and 2019, revealed the scale of the problem: contamination at well over 400 active installations, with dozens of others identified subsequently. By 2023, the DoD's own contamination database listed over 700 installations with known or suspected PFAS contamination.

The contamination is not uniform. Some bases have PFAS in nearby surface water but not drinking water wells. Others have contaminated on-base wells and have taken thousands of affected personnel off tap water. The worst cases — places like Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire, Tucson International Airport (adjacent to Davis-Monthan AFB), and Camp Lejeune — have contamination histories spanning decades and affecting both military and civilian populations.

Pease Air Force Base, New Hampshire: PFOS and PFOA levels in well water on and near the base exceeded 900 ppt at the time of initial testing in 2014 — more than 200 times the EPA's current 4 ppt limit. A state health department blood testing program for Pease-area residents documented PFAS serum levels significantly higher than national averages.

Tucson, Arizona: Contamination from Davis-Monthan AFB's AFFF use spread into city water supply areas. Environmental remediation has been ongoing for years.

Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina: Though the Camp Lejeune contamination story is primarily associated with volatile organic compounds (trichloroethylene, benzene), PFAS contamination has also been identified in some areas of the base, adding to the exposure burden on veterans who served there.

Cancers Linked to AFFF Exposure

AFFF exposure creates a PFAS body burden in people who worked with it directly (military and civilian firefighters who participated in training exercises, crash response, and maintenance), and in people who drank contaminated groundwater over years or decades.

The strongest scientific evidence links long-term PFAS exposure to:

Kidney cancer (renal cell carcinoma): Multiple occupational cohort studies of 3M PFOS-manufacturing workers have documented elevated kidney cancer rates. A 2022 National Cancer Institute study of 3M Decatur, Alabama plant workers found significantly elevated standardized incidence ratios for kidney cancer. This is the best-documented cancer outcome in the AFFF litigation.

Testicular cancer: Elevated rates in PFAS-exposed populations documented in multiple studies. A well-known study of Malmö, Sweden firefighters found elevated testicular cancer incidence associated with AFFF exposure. Occupational firefighter cohort studies in the U.S. have produced similar findings.

Bladder cancer: The epidemiological association is less robust than kidney or testicular cancer but consistent enough to be included in settlement matrices.

Non-Hodgkin lymphoma: Several population studies near contaminated sites have found elevated NHL rates.

Thyroid cancer and disease: PFAS compounds disrupt thyroid hormone synthesis. Both thyroid cancer and non-malignant thyroid disease appear in high-exposure population studies.

Prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, and certain liver conditions are also included in various legal frameworks, though the epidemiological evidence is less uniform.

MDL 2873: The AFFF Products Liability Litigation

The federal AFFF litigation is consolidated in MDL 2873, "In Re: Aqueous Film-Forming Foam Products Liability Litigation," assigned to U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel in the District of South Carolina.

MDL 2873 is one of the largest product liability MDLs currently pending in the federal courts. It encompasses two tracks:

Municipal/water utility track: Cities, water utilities, and other governmental entities suing AFFF manufacturers for contamination cleanup costs. These cases produced the 3M $10.3 billion settlement and the DuPont/Chemours settlement described in our settlement overview piece.

Personal injury track: Individuals — primarily current and former military personnel, civilian employees of military installations, and residents of surrounding communities — suing for cancer and other health conditions caused by PFAS exposure from AFFF. These cases were explicitly excluded from the municipal settlements and remain active litigation.

The personal injury track in MDL 2873 involves defendants beyond 3M and DuPont, including the companies that actually manufactured finished AFFF products: Tyco Fire Products (a subsidiary of Johnson Controls), National Foam (now owned by National Foam/Angus International), Kidde (UTC), and others. The science of which AFFF formulations were used at which bases, and when, is a complex factual issue that varies case by case.

As of early 2026, the personal injury cases in MDL 2873 are in active discovery. No bellwether trials for PI cases have yet occurred, though the court has signaled its intent to move the cases to trial on an accelerated schedule.

Veteran-Specific Claims and the PACT Act

Veterans with PFAS-related cancer face a fork in the road: VA benefits and civil litigation. These are not mutually exclusive, but they work differently.

VA benefits under the PACT Act: The Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address thorough Toxics Act (PACT Act), signed by President Biden on August 10, 2022, significantly expanded VA disability benefits and health care for veterans exposed to toxic substances. PFAS is specifically listed among covered toxic exposures. Veterans who served at contaminated installations and develop covered cancers may qualify for VA disability compensation (rated 0% to 100%) and VA health care coverage.

The VA process is separate from civil litigation. Receiving VA disability compensation does not prevent a veteran from also filing a civil lawsuit against the manufacturers of AFFF. However, any civil settlement or verdict may offset certain VA benefits in complex ways. An attorney familiar with both VA law and mass tort litigation can help veterans understand how to maximize both sources of recovery.

Civil litigation: Veterans, like civilian plaintiffs, can bring personal injury claims in MDL 2873 against AFFF manufacturers. The key distinction is that the government itself (the Department of Defense, the military services) is not a defendant — sovereign immunity protects government entities from suit. The defendants are the private companies that manufactured and sold AFFF, knowing or recklessly disregarding the PFAS contamination risk.

Documents disclosed in discovery have shown that 3M had internal research as early as the 1970s documenting PFAS accumulation in blood and tissues. The company continued manufacturing and selling AFFF ingredients for decades after those findings, without public disclosure. That's the core of the failure-to-warn claim.

Civilian Claims Near Military Bases

AFFF contamination doesn't respect installation boundaries. When PFAS-laden groundwater migrates off-base, it enters the water supply of neighboring communities. Residents who never set foot on a military installation may carry elevated PFAS body burdens simply from decades of drinking their city water.

These community members can also pursue claims in MDL 2873 under the personal injury track, provided they can establish: (1) their water supply was contaminated by AFFF from an identified military installation, (2) they consumed that water over a significant period, and (3) they have a PFAS-linked health diagnosis.

Establishing the source can require environmental testing, EPA database records, and sometimes expert hydrogeological analysis showing the contamination plume's migration from the installation to the plaintiff's water source. This is more complex than cases involving workers who handled AFFF directly, but it's legally viable and has been pursued successfully in state court litigation predating MDL 2873.

For context on how to document your exposure and what health conditions qualify, see our PFAS health effects page, our military base contamination overview, and our general AFFF page.

Related Resources

• AFFF Firefighting Foam: Full Overview
• Military Base PFAS Contamination Map
• PFAS Health Effects and Linked Cancers
• The 3M Settlement and Individual Claims
• Check Your Water System's PFAS Level

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