Check the presumptive list first, because it may make all of this unnecessary

If your condition and your service are on a presumptive list, you do not have to prove exposure at all. VA presumes it. People spend months assembling an environmental record they never needed, and that is the most common waste of effort in this corner of the process.

So start at VA's PACT Act page, which sets out the presumptive conditions against service locations and date ranges, and VA's hazardous materials exposure page, which indexes the recognised exposures — Agent Orange, asbestos, mustard gas and lewisite, Camp Lejeune water from August 1953 to December 1987, burn pits, radiation, Project 112/SHAD, Gulf War illnesses.

If you are on a list, stop reading this page and go file.

The trap, before anything else

Everything below helps you document that a place was contaminated while you were standing in it. That is one element of a claim, and not the one most claims are denied on.

Direct service connection needs a current diagnosis, an in-service event, and a medical opinion connecting the two. The environmental record is the middle one. A veteran who finds their base on a federal contamination list, files on that basis, and gets denied will reasonably conclude VA ignored proof — when what actually happened is that nothing in the file said this contaminant plausibly caused this condition in this person. McLendon governs when that evidence is enough to require VA to get an examination, and medical opinions is the page about the element itself.

Documenting the exposure makes the nexus opinion possible. It does not replace it.

No VA tool will tell you what was at a given base. VA's exposure pages explain which exposures are recognised; none lets you look up where you were and find out what was there. That gap is why the research below is yours or your representative's.

But there is a VA clinical route, and it is the most useful thing on this page. See the next section before you start digging.

Ask VA for a Military Environmental Exposure Assessment

Most veterans have had, or will have, a Toxic Exposure Screening — a short set of questions, five to ten minutes, that every enrolled veteran is offered at least every five years. It is a screening, and it is not the same thing.

A Military Environmental Exposure Assessment is a clinical evaluation, usually 30 to 60 minutes, carried out by VA clinicians with special training and advanced certification in military environmental exposures. It goes into your exposures in detail and addresses the questions you actually have. You are eligible if you are enrolled in VA health care.

VA states the position on claims directly, and it is worth quoting rather than paraphrasing: a MEEA is not required for a VA disability claim, but it can help support one by documenting your deployment and exposure history in your medical record.

That is the point. An exposure concern that exists only in your memory is hard to use. The same concern, taken down by a clinician trained in it and sitting in your record, is evidence — and it is the kind of evidence that gets written before anyone is arguing about it.

Three ways to ask, all on that page:

• Your local Environmental Health Coordinator, who can see you in person or by telehealth.
• VET-HOME, VA's national telehealth programme, on 833-633-8846, or by live chat at vethome.va.gov.
• Your own VA care team, who can refer you to either.

Go in with a factual exposure history, not an argument

This is what makes the hour useful, and it is almost entirely preparation you can do beforehand. Write it flat — dates, places, routines — and leave the conclusions out.

• Where you lived and where you worked, separately, with dates as precise as you can get them. Housing records, orders and assignment history will fix them better than memory.
• How you would actually have come into contact with it. This is the part people leave out and the part a clinician needs. Washing, showering and handwashing. Water used to prepare food and drinks in a dining facility. Air in a particular building or on a particular flight line. Dust, soil, or skin contact in a specific job. Routine and duration matter more than any single event.
• What you did not do, where that is true. "I rarely drank the tap water" belongs in the history just as much as what you did. Stating the limits of your own exposure is what makes the rest of it credible, and an account with no limits in it reads as an argument.
• Your job, in terms of what it had you handling or standing next to, rather than only the title.

Then the health chronology — what your records show and when — as a separate list, for the reason set out further down this page: a clinician handed facts can reason from them, and one handed a conclusion has to take it apart first.

Step one: pin down where you were, and when

This is the part only you can supply, and it is the key every other source is searched by. Dates matter as much as places — contamination at an installation has a documented period, and a tour that fell outside it is a different question.

From your own records: your DD-214 and personnel file for assignments and dates, your MOS or rating and what it actually had you doing, and any TDY or deployment orders. Write it out as a list of installations with date ranges before you search anything. Vague is not usable — "Fort Somewhere, sometime in the nineties" cannot be matched against a document that says 1987 to 1991.

Step two: ATSDR, for what the contaminants actually were

This is the most useful source and the least known, and it is CDC rather than EPA.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry publishes public health assessments for contaminated sites, including a great many military installations. A public health assessment is not a list — it names the chemicals found, the pathways by which people could be exposed, the concentrations, and the periods involved. That is exactly the shape of thing a clinician needs in order to write an opinion.

Start at ATSDR's Public Health Assessments and Health Consultations and use its document index, which is searchable by state. The per-state listings are real and they do include installations by name — Virginia's listing, for instance, carries Marine Corps Combat Development Command Quantico, Naval Support Facility Dahlgren, Naval Weapons Station Yorktown and Radford Army Ammunition Plant alongside the civilian sites.

Assessments exist for installations across the country. Published examples, to show what one looks like before you go hunting for yours:

• Pease Air Force Base, New Hampshire
• Former Fort McClellan, Alabama
• MCCDC Quantico, Virginia

Some of these assessments are live work, not finished history. ATSDR's Red Hill assessment, for instance, is evaluating environmental and health data collected since 2005 — a span that reaches back long before the 2021 release that prompted it. Where an assessment is ongoing, ATSDR says it talks with residents and organisational leaders, responds to questions and concerns, and takes part in community meetings, and it publishes contacts for the regional team.

Be precise about what that does and does not mean. ATSDR does not advertise collecting individual exposure histories, and it is not an alternative to filing. What it is: a public health body actively working on a site that may be the one you were stationed at, with people you can ask whether your period and location are inside what they are evaluating. That is worth a question, and the answer may date your exposure better than anything you can assemble alone.

Where an assessment is open, ATSDR publishes contacts for the regional office running it on the assessment's own page. Something you can say:

"I lived at [base] from [month, year] to [month, year], and used the base water mainly for [bathing, food prepared in the dining facility, drinking]. Is that period and that population inside what your current assessment is evaluating? And is there anything from residents of that era you are collecting?"

That is a question about scope, which they can answer. It is not a request for a finding about you, which they cannot.

ATSDR reorganised its website, and older guides point at pages that no longer work. The former per-state address redirects to the landing page rather than to a state list, so a link you find in a document from a few years ago will appear to work while silently losing your search. Individual assessment documents at the older addresses are still live. If a link fails, go back to the landing page and search again rather than assuming the assessment does not exist — and ATSDR's records centre will supply a document by full site name and date if the website will not.

And an old finding of "no contamination" is not the end of the question. An assessment published years ago reflects the monitoring data and the understanding of that moment. Red Hill is the illustration again: a 2005 assessment reported the deep drinking-water aquifer uncontaminated on the information then available, and ATSDR is now re-examining the same site across a period that includes those years. The site's standing lesson applies — a source can survive its own supersession — so check whether an assessment has been revisited before treating it as closed.

Step three: EPA, for the regulatory record

EPA tells you a site's official status. That is corroboration and context rather than exposure evidence, and it is still worth having, because a National Priorities List entry is a formal federal finding that a place was contaminated badly enough to warrant it.

Two tools:

• Search for Superfund sites where you live — by state, with an interactive map and a data table that carries a federal facility status column. Military installations are well represented there.
• Cleanups in My Community — broader, covering Superfund, Brownfields, RCRA corrective actions, removal sites and federal facilities. Search by address, city, state or ZIP, and it will map federal facilities on their own.

What EPA gives you is the site, its listing history and its contaminants of concern. What it does not give you is who was present, when, or through what pathway. That is the ATSDR half.

Step four: the Defense Department's own restoration record

The Defense Environmental Programs Annual Report to Congress is published at DENIX, with reports going back to the nineties and — more usefully — an installation-level search that lets you pull the cleanup record for a named installation rather than reading an aggregate report.

Many installations also run their own administrative-record websites for a cleanup, holding the underlying technical documents. Those are not centrally indexed, so searching for the installation's name together with "administrative record" or "environmental restoration" is the practical route. There is no single address to give you, and a constructed one would be wrong.

Step five: your individual exposure record, when it opens

The Individual Longitudinal Exposure Record is the joint DoD and VA system meant to answer exactly the question this page works around: what were you exposed to.

It is not available to veterans yet. DoD opened it to servicemembers in March 2026, and its own FAQ says VA "is currently forecasted to offer Veteran access using department-approved access methods starting in the Fall of 2026." Nothing published confirms that has happened. Ask your representative whether it has opened rather than taking a date from any website, this one included.

Two things worth knowing in advance. It will allow self-reporting of missing exposures — and self-reported entries stay labelled as self-reported and do not alter the official record, so adding something is not the same as documenting it. And an absence in ILER is not evidence you were not exposed; it is a record built from what was collected at the time, which for older service is very little.

Registries are not claims

If you deployed to the theatres and periods it covers, VA's Airborne Hazards and Open Burn Pit Registry collects a health questionnaire and an exposure history. It is reached from VA's exposure pages, which are the right place to check eligibility since the theatres and dates have been expanded more than once.

Be clear about what it is. Per the Defense Health Agency's own description, participation "will not affect access to health care or benefits, and it is not related to the VA disability compensation claims process." Joining a registry is not filing, and not joining does not hurt a claim. It is worth doing on its own terms, and it is not a step in this research.

Two things that will save you money and effort

There is no blood or urine test that shows an exposure from years ago. This is the question everyone reaches for, and the answer is settled: a 2026 National Academies review of the Red Hill jet-fuel releases found that no validated medical tests exist to confirm past exposure or the extent of exposure. (The finding is quoted here rather than linked: the report is reported widely and a canonical page for it could not be confirmed, and this site does not link a URL it has not opened.) Biomarkers appear in that report as a research recommendation, not an available service. Anyone selling you a "toxic exposure panel" on that basis is selling you something that cannot do what it implies.

What does the work instead is the combination this page is about: historical reconstruction of where you were and what was there, a contemporaneous medical record, and a clinician's assessment.

Keep the exposure evidence and the health evidence apart. Assemble one file that establishes where you were and what was documented there — orders, housing or duty records, the environmental reports — and a separate chronology of what your records show and when. Do not merge them into a single document that announces the conclusion.

That is not modesty, it is how the evidence gets weighed. Nieves-Rodriguez is on this site because reasoning is what gives a medical opinion its weight. A clinician handed a clean exposure record and a clean medical chronology can reason from them. One handed an argument has to unpick it first, and an examiner reading a packet that asserts its own conclusion tends to weigh the assertion rather than the facts under it.

Where this belongs in a claim, and where it does not

If you turn up an exposure history while a review is already running, the timing matters. A Higher-Level Review takes no new evidence — the record is closed, and new material does not belong there and cannot help there. A Supplemental Claim is the route that accepts new and relevant evidence.

So finding something mid-review is not a reason to send it immediately. It is a reason to ask your representative which lane it belongs in, and the answer is usually "not this one, the next one."

What this research can and cannot do for you

It can establish the in-service element with documents nobody can argue with, give a clinician the specific contaminants and periods they need in order to write a reasoned opinion rather than a guess, and tell you early that your condition is presumptive and none of this is necessary.

It cannot tell you whether your condition was caused by the exposure. That is a medical question and it needs a clinician who has examined you and read your records. Nieves-Rodriguez is the case on what makes such an opinion worth anything, and the short version is that reasoning carries the weight, not conclusions.

And it cannot decide what to claim. Which conditions, on what theory, with which records attached, is the work an accredited representative does — free, through a VSO, with your file in front of them. Finding a contamination report is a good reason to go and see one, and a bad reason to file without one.

A last caution. Documented contamination at a well-known installation attracts people who will charge you a percentage to tell you what the presumptive list says for nothing. Nobody needs to be paid to check whether your condition is on a list, and an accredited representative cannot charge you for help with an initial claim at all.

Next: what each kind of evidence can establish · medical opinions · your VA records and the C-File · theories of service connection

Reviewed October 7, 2026