JPML Centralizes Firefighter Turnout Gear PFAS Claims as MDL 3191

The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation issued a transfer order on August 18, 2026 creating MDL 3191, In re: Non-AFFF Firefighter Turnout Gear Marketing, Sales Practices, and Products Liability Litigation, and centralizing the claims in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota before Judge Jeffrey M. Bryan. The panel rejected efforts to fold the cases into the existing AFFF firefighting-foam MDL in South Carolina, and instead pointed to defendant 3M's Minnesota headquarters as a factor favoring the new venue.

The order follows the July 30, 2026 oral argument on whether to centralize five actions, brought by 20 plaintiffs including the City of Rochester, New York, that allege PFAS-treated turnout gear exposes firefighters directly through skin contact and inhalation. Law360 reported the consolidated actions were filed by municipal purchasers across 14 states, including cases previously pending in Montana and California.

Why Minnesota, Not South Carolina

Judge Richard Gergel, who presides over the AFFF MDL 2873 and its 15,246 pending cases (per the JPML's August 2026 statistics), had requested in August 2025 to coordinate turnout gear claims within his existing docket. The panel declined again, as it had in December 2024 and December 2025, holding that turnout-gear-only claims don't involve AFFF allegations on their face.

Named defendants across the turnout gear cases include Honeywell Safety Products, W.L. Gore & Associates, Milliken & Company, Lion Group, Globe Manufacturing, Fire-Dex, Morning Pride Manufacturing, PBI Performance Products, Elevate Textiles, Safety Components Fabric Technologies, and Stedfast USA. NIST Technical Note 2260 found median PFAS in treated outer-shell gear textiles rose from 1,430 µg/kg when new to 4,420 µg/kg after exposure to elevated temperatures. That finding supports the direct-exposure theory that separates this litigation from AFFF.

What Happens Now That the MDL Is Live

Centralization converts five scattered actions into a coordinated pretrial proceeding with master pleadings, a leadership structure, and, typically within the first few months, a Plaintiff Fact Sheet protocol modeled on the AFFF and hernia mesh dockets.

The Employment-Plus-Medical Record Checklist

Because turnout gear exposure is occupational, proof runs through two parallel tracks that have to be assembled together, not sequentially.

• Employment and assignment history: Fire department personnel files establishing hire date, years of active duty, and station or company assignments.
• Gear issuance logs: Records identifying the specific turnout gear brand and model issued to a claimant, and how often gear was replaced.
• Incident and fireground exposure logs: Run reports and overhaul-duty records that establish frequency of gear wear under heat and abrasion, the conditions NIST found raise measurable PFAS levels in gear textiles.
• Diagnosis and treatment records: Oncology, pathology, and specialist records confirming the qualifying condition, typically spanning multiple civilian and occupational-health providers.
• Prior military or hazmat exposure records: Many firefighters have overlapping exposure histories (AFFF, hazmat response) that defense counsel will scrutinize for alternative causation.

The medical half of that checklist is retrieval work. LlamaLab pulls oncology, pathology, and occupational health records at mass tort scale in 4 days on average, using insurance data to surface providers a firefighter may not remember across a decades-long career.

The Bottom Line

MDL 3191 gives firefighter turnout gear claims a dedicated federal forum for the first time, separate from the much larger AFFF docket. That's a procedural win for plaintiffs who have argued for years that direct-contact gear exposure is a distinct claim from foam runoff into water supplies. But a forum doesn't resolve a case: occupational PFAS claims still turn on proving decades of exposure and a documented diagnosis, evidence that is often scattered across a firefighter's entire career.

Sources: HarrisMartin, Aug. 18, 2026, Bloomberg Law, InsideEPA, Law360, JPML Panel Orders, AboutLawsuits, NIST Technical Note 2260, NIOSH firefighter cancer data via Journal of Occupational Health (2026). This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or medical advice.