A Second PFAS Mass Tort Comes Before the JPML

The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation hears oral argument on July 30, 2026 in Asheville, North Carolina on whether to create a new multidistrict litigation for claims that firefighter turnout gear exposes first responders to PFAS. The proposed docket, MDL 3191, would sit alongside the aqueous film-forming foam litigation that already holds 15,244 pending cases in the District of South Carolina.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. AFFF claims turn on chemicals released into groundwater and drinking water. Turnout gear claims allege the protective clothing itself is the exposure source, worn against the skin for a career. That shifts the proof from environmental sampling toward individual occupational and medical history — a different documentation burden entirely.

How the Motion Reached the Panel

The City of Rochester, New York moved on May 11, 2026 to centralize five class actions in the District of Minnesota, arguing the cases share common allegations and the same core defendants including 3M, according to HarrisMartin. The five actions involve 20 plaintiffs, and the Panel has three paths available: create the new MDL, transfer the cases into the existing AFFF docket, or leave them to proceed separately, InsideEPA reported on July 23.

A competing request came from the bench. U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel, who presides over the AFFF MDL, asked in August 2025 to fold turnout gear claims into his litigation. The Panel has consistently gone the other way. In orders issued in December 2024 and December 2025, it held that "turnout gear-only" actions are not appropriate for inclusion in MDL 2873 because they do not raise AFFF allegations on their face, noting that a single directly-filed turnout gear action in South Carolina "does not justify the expansion of this MDL beyond AFFF claims."

Defendants named in the prior turnout gear actions extend well past 3M to the gear manufacturers and textile suppliers: 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.

The Science Behind the Claims

Two evidentiary threads support this litigation, and both predate it.

The first is occupational cancer risk. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified occupational exposure as a firefighter as carcinogenic to humans, Group 1, in its 2022 review — the agency's strongest evidence category, as the American Cancer Society explains. A 2026 systematic review in the Journal of Occupational Health summarizes NIOSH findings that firefighters carry a 9% higher cancer incidence and 14% higher cancer mortality than the general U.S. population, and identifies PFAS in both firefighting foams and turnout gear as an emerging risk requiring mitigation.

The second is gear-specific measurement. NIST Technical Note 2260 measured 51 PFAS across 20 turnout gear textiles after abrasion, heat, laundering, and weathering. Median summed PFAS in durable-water-repellent-treated outer shells rose from 1,430 µg/kg when new to 3,500 µg/kg with abrasion, 4,420 µg/kg after elevated temperature exposure, and 3,540 µg/kg with weathering. Laundering lowered it, to 963 µg/kg. NIST was careful about mechanism, noting its targeted analytical approach cannot definitively identify why stressed textiles measured higher.

What a New MDL Would Mean

Creating MDL 3191 would open a coordinated docket at its earliest stage, with leadership appointments, a master complaint, and plaintiff fact sheets still to come. For firms evaluating firefighter cancer claims, the practical implications land quickly.

Plaintiff fact sheets in occupational dockets routinely require service dates, employer history, gear assignments, and a full treating-provider list. Clients rarely remember every provider across a thirty-year career, which is where provider discovery matters — the capability AI-assisted retrieval services including LlamaLab are built around. Municipalities and unions appearing as plaintiffs add a second document track: procurement and gear specification records.

Firms with AFFF inventory should also expect overlap. A firefighter exposed to both foam and gear may hold claims in two dockets with different theories and different proof requirements, and the same underlying medical record set has to serve both.

The Bottom Line

The Panel's decision will likely issue within weeks of the July 30 argument. Whichever way it goes, the underlying claims are already filed and the science supporting them is established in the peer-reviewed and government literature.

For firms preparing these cases, the gating item is not the centralization order. It is whether a given firefighter's employment history and thirty years of treatment records can be assembled into a coherent exposure and injury timeline.

Sources: JPML July 2026 Hearing Session Order, JPML Pending MDL Dockets, July 1, 2026, JPML Orders Denying Transfer, HarrisMartin, InsideEPA (July 23, 2026), AboutLawsuits, IARC Monographs Vol. 132, NIST Technical Note 2260, Journal of Occupational Health (2026). This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or medical advice.