For most of a Nevada firefighter’s career, the foam in the tank was just the tool that put out a fuel fire when water would not. It smothered burning jet fuel on a runway, it blanketed a tanker rollover on the interstate, and it ran through the same hose lines and pumps that crews flushed out by hand afterward. It arrived with a performance specification, not a warning label.
The chemistry that made that foam work is the reason it now sits at the center of one of the largest product liability proceedings in the federal court system. Aqueous film forming foam, almost always called AFFF, owed its performance to per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the family of compounds usually shortened to PFAS. Those compounds are extraordinarily stable. They do not break down readily in soil or groundwater, and they do not clear from the human body quickly.
What follows is written for Nevada firefighters, for the aircraft rescue and firefighting crews at this state’s certificated commercial airports, for fire investigators and training instructors, and for families who lost someone after a cancer diagnosis. It covers what the exposure actually was, what the cancer science does and does not establish, how Nevada’s firefighter cancer statute is written, and the short deadlines that end these claims before most people realize a claim existed.
What AFFF Is and Why Its Chemistry Matters
A burning pool of jet fuel or gasoline cannot be put out with water alone. Water sinks, the fuel keeps vaporizing, and the fire keeps finding oxygen. AFFF works differently. Fluorinated surfactants in the concentrate lower surface tension enough that the foam solution spreads into a thin aqueous film across the surface of the fuel, sealing vapor underneath while the foam blanket above smothers what is left. That film is the entire point, and fluorine chemistry is what made the film possible.
Foam meeting the military specification MIL-F-24385 became the standard agent for aircraft firefighting. The Department of Defense has maintained a Qualified Products Database that airport operators holding FAA airport operating certificates could use to confirm that any AFFF they purchased conformed to that specification, a resource the FAA pointed operators toward in October 2018. For decades, buying to spec meant buying fluorinated foam.
The properties that made the film work are the same properties that make PFAS persistent. Carbon and fluorine form one of the strongest bonds in organic chemistry, which is why these compounds resist heat, resist breakdown and accumulate. Foam that ran off a training pad in the 1990s can still be measured in groundwater today.
Federal aviation regulators have since moved the industry off fluorinated foam. In January 2023 the FAA released Part 139 CertAlert 23-01 announcing a new military specification for performance based standards for fluorine free aircraft firefighting foam. In May 2023 it announced an aircraft firefighting foam transition plan. CertAlert 23-07, issued that September, addressed the availability of fluorine free foam on the Navy’s qualified products list. CertAlerts issued in March and May 2024 dealt with cleaning and rinsing aircraft rescue firefighting vehicles transitioning from AFFF to fluorine free foam, and CertAlert 24-11 at the end of December 2024 addressed required output based testing once a transition was complete. That transition is a forward looking fix. It does nothing about exposure that already happened.
Who Was Exposed in Nevada
Exposure in this setting was rarely a single dramatic event. It accumulated over years of ordinary work.
- Aircraft rescue and firefighting crews at Nevada’s certificated commercial airports, where foam capability is a condition of operating and where discharge testing was routine
- Municipal and county firefighters responding to fuel spills, tanker rollovers, aircraft incidents and vehicle fires
- Recruits and instructors at fire training academies, where live fuel fire evolutions were run repeatedly on the same pads
- Fire investigators working scenes after foam had already been applied
- Volunteer firefighters covered under Nevada’s industrial insurance provisions
- Maintenance personnel who tested, flushed, rinsed and repaired foam systems, apparatus tanks and turret plumbing
The routes were skin contact with concentrate and mixed solution, inhalation of aerosolized foam during discharge and testing, and contact with contaminated gear, apparatus and station surfaces afterward. Crews washed foam off equipment with bare hands and ate lunch in the same bay. That was normal practice for the era, and it was not the crews’ doing.
What the Cancer Science Actually Says
This is where precision matters, because the distance between what the science establishes and what a claimant must prove is where these cases are won or lost.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization, evaluated PFOA and PFOS in its Monographs Volume 135. IARC concluded that PFOA is carcinogenic to humans, its Group 1 classification, and that PFOS is possibly carcinogenic to humans, its Group 2B classification. For PFOA the evaluation rested on sufficient evidence of cancer in experimental animals together with strong mechanistic evidence in exposed humans concerning epigenetic alterations and immunosuppression. The evidence in humans was characterized as limited, and it concerned renal cell carcinoma and testicular cancer. You can read the IARC Monographs volume evaluating PFOA and PFOS directly rather than take a summary of it on faith.
Two points follow, and they cut in directions people do not expect. The first is that a Group 1 classification is a hazard identification. It says the agent is capable of causing cancer in humans. It does not say that any particular person’s cancer was caused by it, and no careful lawyer will tell you otherwise at a first meeting. The second is that a Group 1 classification is precisely the kind of finding Nevada’s firefighter cancer statute was drafted to accommodate, which is the subject of the next section.
How Nevada’s Firefighter Cancer Statute Is Written
NRS 617.453 makes cancer an occupational disease compensable under Nevada’s occupational disease chapter, and its structure repays close reading.
The statute first sets a service threshold. The person must have served for five years or more, either employed in this State in a full time salaried occupation as a firefighter for the benefit or safety of the public, as an investigator of fires or arson, or as an instructor or officer providing training concerning fire or hazardous materials, or acting as a volunteer firefighter in this State and entitled to benefits under the industrial insurance chapters pursuant to NRS 616A.145. Service credit purchased in a retirement system cannot be counted toward that total.
The statute then requires two showings. It must be demonstrated that the person was exposed, while in the course of the employment, to a known carcinogen or a substance reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen as defined by the International Agency for Research on Cancer or the National Toxicology Program, and that the carcinogen or substance is reasonably associated with the disabling cancer.
Subsection 2 then does something unusual. It deems particular substances to be known carcinogens reasonably associated with particular cancers, so a claimant whose facts match a listed pairing does not have to build that association from scratch. Asbestos, benzene and formaldehyde are deemed reasonably associated with ovarian cancer. Formaldehyde and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon are deemed reasonably associated with kidney cancer. Diesel exhaust, soot and polychlorinated biphenyls are deemed reasonably associated with testicular cancer. The list runs through roughly two dozen cancers, from bladder and brain through thyroid and uterine.
PFAS compounds appear nowhere on that deemed list. A firefighter with kidney cancer or testicular cancer who wants to build a claim around foam exposure rather than around diesel exhaust or soot gets no help from subsection 2.
Subsection 3 is the provision that matters for a foam based claim. It states that the subsection 2 list is not exclusive and does not preclude any person from demonstrating, on a case by case basis, that a substance is a known carcinogen or is reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen, including an agent classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Group 1 or Group 2A, that is reasonably associated with a disabling cancer. The statute names the IARC Group 1 and Group 2A categories as an express route. PFOA now carries a Group 1 classification. That is the doorway, and walking through it is an evidentiary exercise built on service records, exposure history and medical opinion rather than a checkbox.
The presumption provisions sit separately from all of that. Disabling cancer is rebuttably presumed to have arisen out of and in the course of the employment if it is diagnosed during the course of the qualifying employment. For a firefighter, investigator, instructor or officer who retired before July 1, 2019, and for volunteer firefighters regardless of retirement date, the presumption reaches a diagnosis made after employment ended within a window calculated by multiplying three months by the number of full years of employment, capped at 60 months. For those who retired on or after July 1, 2019, the window after separation equals the number of years worked, and for someone who completed 20 years or more of qualifying service the presumption applies at any time during that person’s life.
Two limits deserve emphasis because they surprise people. The statute states plainly that these presumptions are rebuttable and do not create a conclusive presumption, so an insurer can and will put on evidence against them. And a person who files a claim after retiring under the post July 2019 provision is not entitled to receive any compensation for that disease other than medical benefits.
The Deadlines That End Occupational Disease Claims
Occupational disease claims run on clocks measured in days, not years, and those clocks end more legitimate claims than any defense argument does.
NRS 617.342 requires written notice of the occupational disease to the employer as soon as practicable, but within 7 days after the employee, or a dependent, has knowledge of the disability and its relationship to the employment. The notice goes on a form prescribed by the Administrator and is prepared in duplicate so both sides keep a copy.
NRS 617.344 requires the employee to file a claim for compensation with the insurer within 90 days after the employee has knowledge of the disability and its relationship to the employment. Where the employee has died from the occupational disease, a dependent must file within one year after the death.
Both clocks run from knowledge, which is the only reason these claims survive at all given how long cancer takes to appear. The day a physician connects the diagnosis to the job is the day counting starts. Waiting until treatment finishes, or until the department says something, is how a real claim becomes an untimely one. The same discipline about prompt written notice applies to any unsafe working conditions claim brought in Nevada.
A Claim Against the Foam Manufacturers Runs on a Different Track
The compensation system is the exclusive remedy against the employer. It is not a shield for the companies that formulated, manufactured, distributed and sold the foam.
NRS 616C.215 preserves the injured employee’s right, or the dependents’ right in a death case, to proceed against a third person legally responsible for the injury. The insurer is subrogated to those rights and holds a lien on the total proceeds of any recovery. The employee or the employee’s representative must notify the insurer in writing before initiating the action, and within 15 days after a recovery by judgment, settlement or otherwise the insurer must be notified and paid what it is owed, together with an itemized statement showing the distribution of the total recovery. Compensation otherwise payable is reduced by the damages recovered, so nobody is paid twice for the same loss.
A claim against a foam manufacturer is a product claim governed by ordinary Nevada tort principles rather than by the occupational disease chapter, which changes almost every rule that applies to it. The limitations period comes from NRS 11.190(4)(e), which allows two years for an action to recover damages for injuries to a person caused by the wrongful act or neglect of another. Nevada’s modified comparative negligence rule under NRS 41.141 applies, barring recovery where the claimant’s share of fault exceeds 50 percent and otherwise reducing damages in proportion to that share. Where the exposed person has died, the wrongful death structure in NRS 41.085 identifies the heirs and the personal representative of the estate as the parties who may bring the claim. The general framework matches other defective product injury claims in Nevada, and families should look at Nevada wrongful death claims early, because that clock runs separately from the compensation clock.
Long latency occupational exposure cases have a rhythm of their own, and anyone whose family has been through an asbestos exposure claim will recognize it. Advanced cancer also carries the treatment and life care costs that place these matters in the same practical category as other catastrophic injury claims.
Where the AFFF Litigation Stands Right Now
Federal AFFF cases are consolidated. The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation created MDL 2873, In re Aqueous Film-Forming Foams Products Liability Litigation, and transferred it to the District of South Carolina in December 2018, where it is assigned to Judge Richard M. Gergel under master docket number 2:18-mn-2873. According to the Panel’s own statistics report dated July 1, 2026, 15,244 actions were pending in that proceeding.
What an MDL is matters as much as how large it is. Consolidation gathers federal cases before one judge for coordinated pretrial proceedings, discovery and rulings on common questions. It is not a class action, it does not merge individual claims into a single case, and it does not decide whether any particular claimant recovers anything. Cases that are not resolved during the consolidated proceedings can be returned to the districts where they were filed.
We will not tell you how this litigation will turn out, what any claim might be worth, or how long it will take, because nobody can responsibly say those things. What can be said is that the proceeding is active, that its size reflects how many people believe they were harmed, and that taking part in it requires an individually filed case supported by its own proof of exposure, diagnosis and causation.
What to Do Now, and How to Reach The Bourassa Law Group
A few practical steps help every one of these claims and cost nothing.
- Write out your exposure history while you still remember it, including departments, stations, assignments, dates, training facilities and the kinds of incidents where foam was used
- Request your personnel and assignment records, which are what establish the five years of qualifying service the statute requires
- Gather medical records and pathology reports rather than relying on your memory of what a doctor said
- Ask your treating physician to document in the chart any opinion connecting the diagnosis to occupational exposure, since that entry often starts the statutory clock and later becomes the proof that the clock was met
- Preserve anything that documents foam use at your stations, including training records, incident reports and equipment logs
- Do not wait for the department, the union or the insurer to tell you a deadline is running
If you served as a firefighter, fire investigator or fire training instructor in Nevada and have been diagnosed with cancer, or you are a family member of someone who died after such a diagnosis, The Bourassa Law Group offers a free consultation to review the service history, the exposure evidence, the medical documentation and the notice and filing deadlines that apply to your situation. Because the occupational disease clocks are measured in days from the moment you learn the disease is work related, that conversation is worth having early, even while records are still being collected.
This article is general information about Nevada law, federal regulation and published scientific evaluations, and it is not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney client relationship. Every claim depends on its own facts, service history and medical proof, so speak with a licensed Nevada attorney about your circumstances, or read more about Nevada personal injury representation.
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