Kelly Air Force Base

Base Background

The installation was established March 27, 1917, as one of the Army’s new WWI-era training camps, briefly known as Camp Kelly before being renamed Kelly Field on July 30, 1917. Over the following decades it grew into one of the Air Force’s major aviation training, supply depot, and aircraft maintenance and repair facilities before closing in 2001 under a Base Realignment and Closure decision. About half its acreage, including its runways, was realigned to the neighboring Lackland Air Force Base as the Kelly Field Annex; the other half transferred to Port San Antonio for civilian redevelopment.

Toxic Exposure at Kelly Air Force Base

For decades, Kelly operated as an airfield, fuel depot, and aircraft maintenance and repair facility that included parts cleaning, stripping, painting, and metal plating, leaving behind a well-documented record of chemical, herbicide, and firefighting-foam contamination. Former service members and nearby residents remain affected by that legacy today.

PFAS Contamination

Firefighting foam containing PFOS and PFOA was used at Kelly for decades before the base closed. A 2019 news investigation reviewing the Air Force’s own 2017 groundwater testing found the combined PFOS-and-PFOA reading at the former base reaching 142,000 parts per trillion.

Agent Orange

The VA’s list of domestic herbicide test and storage sites names Kelly Air Force Base as the site of an Agent Orange storage location in Yard 62, East Kelly area, dated November 18, 1970. Despite that documented storage history, Kelly is not on VA’s list of presumptive Agent Orange exposure locations, so a disability claim tied to Agent Orange exposure there needs solid medical and exposure evidence connecting a diagnosis to time spent at the base. If you have a case denied by the VA, get a free, no-obligation review from our team: Hill & Ponton focuses on assisting denied and underrated veterans, with a 96% success rate.

Volatile Organic Compounds and Heavy Metals

The EPA has identified the primary contaminants at the former base as trichloroethylene (TCE), tetrachloroethylene (PCE), benzene, chlorobenzene, and chromium, along with petroleum products, tied to decades of solvent use, parts cleaning, and metal plating. Remaining offsite groundwater plumes, mainly TCE and PCE, drain toward Leon Creek and Six Mile Creek, and nearly 1,000 monitoring wells on and off the former base are still sampled regularly today.

ATSDR’s own review of two on-base drinking-water wells, sealed in 1991 and 1998 after a pipe connecting them leaked, found chloroform and 1,2-dichloroethane at levels that briefly exceeded federal drinking-water screening values in the 1980s, on top of the PCE and TCE already documented nearby. Separate on-base groundwater sampling also turned up mercury and lead, though at concentrations ATSDR concluded were not a health hazard.

Historical Air Emissions

A 2006 ATSDR health consultation traced decades of air emissions from Kelly’s industrial buildings and flight operations. Stationary sources, chiefly five chromium-plating shops and related industrial processes, released tetrachloroethylene (PCE), hexavalent chromium, methylene chloride, methyl ethyl ketone, benzene, ethylbenzene, formaldehyde, toluene, xylene, styrene, naphthalene, acrolein, acetaldehyde, trichloroethylene (TCE), trichloroethane, and dichloroethane. Jet fuel exhaust added more of the same benzene, toluene, xylene, formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, and naphthalene to the air nearby, along with 1,3-butadiene, until the base switched from JP-4 to JP-8 fuel in 1994. ATSDR concluded most of these releases were unlikely to have caused health problems, but it could not rule out a health hazard from hexavalent chromium emitted before 1980, when emissions data from the base’s plating shops was incomplete or missing entirely.

Getting Compensation for Toxic Exposure

Kelly AFB closed in 2001, but its contamination legacy didn’t end there: anyone who served, worked, or lived nearby before then can still develop a related condition today, sometimes decades later. The chart below shows the specific health conditions tied to the toxins documented at the base. Hill & Ponton’s VA-accredited lawyers have decades of experience with this kind of cases, for both veterans and their survivors, working entirely on contingency (no upfront costs). Find out what your case could be worth with a free evaluation.