Maryland Firefighters Exposed to Cancer-Causing PFAS Foam: Your Legal Rights After the AFFF Ban
If you are a firefighter in Maryland — career or volunteer — and you have been diagnosed with cancer, or you are watching a family member fight it, and you are reading this at 2 a.m. wondering whether the foam you trained with, fought fires with, and stored in your firehouse for decades has anything to do with what is happening to your body, the answer is: it very well may. And the fact that the State of Maryland banned this foam in 2022 but has done nothing to remove it from your firehouse for four years is not a footnote. It is the center of the case.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We handle toxic tort cases and wrongful death claims for people who were exposed to something that was supposed to protect them and instead made them sick. We are writing this for the Maryland firefighter who trusted the foam, the family who is living with the diagnosis, and the surviving spouse who is wondering whether it is too late to do anything about it.
Here is the first thing you need to hear: the manufacturers of this foam — the chemical companies that formulated it, sold it, and put it into the hands of firefighters across Maryland — are being sued right now in a consolidated federal litigation that has produced multi-billion-dollar settlements. Maryland’s legislature recognized the danger and banned the foam. The fact that the state agency has not cleaned it up does not make the manufacturers any less responsible for the cancer it causes. It makes the exposure ongoing.
What Happened in Maryland: The Ban That Never Removed the Foam
In 2022, the Maryland General Assembly passed a law banning the use of PFAS-containing firefighting foam — a substance called aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF — because the chemicals in it, called PFAS, are linked to cancer, reproductive harm, and other serious diseases. The law was named the George “Walter” Taylor Act, after a firefighter who served 31 years at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station and the Solomons Island Volunteer Fire Department and died of cancer. His name is on the law because the legislature recognized what his family already knew: the foam that firefighters trusted to put out fires was making them sick.
The law did two things. It banned the use of PFAS-containing AFFF in firefighting operations. And it required the Maryland Department of the Environment to develop a takeback program — a system to collect and dispose of the foam that was already sitting in firehouses across the state. The legislature appropriated $500,000 to fund it.
Four years later, the foam is still there.
According to a survey conducted by MDE, at least 10,535 gallons of PFAS-containing material is dispersed among fire departments across Maryland. Prince George’s County has approximately 1,000 gallons centralized in one storage facility. In Southern Maryland, at the Mechanicsville Volunteer Fire Department in St. Mary’s County, approximately 125 gallons sit in containers in a storage shed. And there is a concern that some departments may never have drained the foam from the tanks on their fire trucks — meaning it could still be in the apparatus, still in the buildings, still in the environment.
MDE has made two attempts to find a contractor willing to collect and dispose of the material. Both failed. In April 2026, the agency issued a new request for bids — its third attempt. The Secretary of MDE wrote to the bill’s Senate sponsor acknowledging that “implementation has not moved as quickly as intended.”
The sponsor’s response was direct: “Four years? For doing nothing? It’s not acceptable.”
He is right. And for a firefighter who served in a Maryland firehouse during the decades this foam was in use — or who is still serving in one where it sits in a closet — the regulatory failure is not just a political story. It is an ongoing exposure that may extend the window for a legal claim.
Who Is at Risk: Maryland Firefighters and PFAS Exposure
The people who face the greatest risk from AFFF are the ones who handled it most: career and volunteer firefighters who used the foam in training exercises, emergency responses, and equipment maintenance. AFFF was designed for Class B fires — flammable liquid fires like gasoline, jet fuel, and oil. It works by forming a film on top of the burning liquid that smothers the fire. That film is made with PFAS compounds, which give the foam its heat- and oil-resistant properties.
Firefighters were exposed to PFAS through multiple pathways:
- Dermal absorption — handling the foam concentrate, getting it on skin and turnout gear during training and emergency use
- Inhalation — breathing in aerosolized foam during training exercises, particularly at facilities that conducted live-fire training with AFFF
- Ingestion — swallowing contaminated water or food, particularly at firehouses where foam may have contaminated the water supply or been tracked inside on boots and equipment
- Proximity to stored foam — simply being in a firehouse where gallons of AFFF sit in storage closets and sheds, where containers may leak or degrade over years
The Chesapeake Bay watershed adds an environmental-justice dimension to this exposure. PFAS are “forever chemicals” — they do not break down in the environment. They accumulate. When foam is used, spilled, or stored improperly, the chemicals can seep into groundwater and surface water, contaminating drinking water supplies for the communities around the firehouse. Maryland’s proximity to military installations — including Patuxent River Naval Air Station, which was a major AFFF user — creates overlapping federal and state exposure pathways that make the contamination picture even more complex.
The Health Hazard: What PFAS Does to the Human Body
PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — are a class of human-made chemicals used in everything