§ 214-i-B.[There are two § 214-i] Action to recover damages for personal injury caused by contact with or exposure to toxic burn pits.

This entry addresses the toxic-burn-pit version of what the CPLR prints as section 214-i. The official statute itself flags a real drafting collision: two entirely unrelated laws share the same base number. One governs consumer credit transaction debt collection, covered separately in this reference as 214-i. This one — indexed here as 214-i-B to keep the two apart — concerns military burn pit exposure and has nothing to do with consumer debt.

The section covers a servicemember injured by exposure to toxic burn pits while serving in the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and an extensive list of other countries and territories, on or after August 2, 1990. That veteran has three years to sue, running from discovery of the injury or from when reasonable diligence should have revealed its cause, whichever is later. The section lists qualifying conditions — including asthma diagnosed after service, any cancer, chronic bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, bronchiolitis, emphysema, granulomatous disease, interstitial lung disease, lymphoma, pleuritis, pulmonary fibrosis, and sarcoidosis — but the list isn't exclusive; personal injury under the section isn't limited to those diagnoses.

CPLR 214-i-B extends to a new generation of veterans the same discovery-based accrual model the legislature built decades earlier for Agent Orange exposure in CPLR 214-b. Both sections recognize that toxic military exposure injuries can take years to surface and to be traced to their cause, and both respond by starting the clock at discovery rather than at exposure.