ABB Lummus Asbestos Trust Claims

If you worked at a refinery or chemical plant that Lummus built or designed, or around the feedwater heaters it once manufactured, and later developed mesothelioma or another asbestos disease, the company left behind a trust built to pay these claims.

ABB Lummus, known for most of its history simply as Lummus, was an engineering company that designed and built refineries and petrochemical plants across the country, and for a stretch of years it also manufactured feedwater heaters, a kind of heat-transfer equipment, at a plant in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Both lines of work exposed people to asbestos: the workers on Lummus's construction projects breathed it while building plants that were full of it, and the heaters made at Honesdale before 1957 contained it. When the asbestos claims mounted, Lummus reorganized in bankruptcy and set aside about $38 million in a trust, funded by an insurance settlement and a payment from the company, to pay current and future claims. The Lummus business itself reorganized and kept operating, and continues today as a major process-technology company.

You don't need to have kept your old records, and you don't need to remember the details of the equipment or the contractor on the job. The trust pays on documented exposure to ABB Lummus asbestos, and reconstructing your history, including which kind of Lummus exposure you had, is our job, not yours. If you can tell us where you worked and when, we have a place to start.

What the ABB Lummus trust pays, by disease

The trust uses two separate value schedules, depending on how you were exposed to Lummus asbestos.

Design and construction claims — exposure during Lummus's construction or design of a refinery or chemical plant. These are the more common and higher-valued claims. Values before the payment percentage is applied:

Feedwater heater claims — exposure to the feedwater heaters Lummus made at its Honesdale plant before 1957, a narrow slice of its history. These claims are valued much lower:

Scheduled is the fixed amount under Expedited Review; average and maximum are reached through Individual Review. A dash means no value at that tier: lung cancer 2 is Individual Review only, and the non-malignant levels (I to III) pay their set amount with no uplift. Your actual payment is the value times the trust's current payment percentage, 9.5%, so a maximum mesothelioma design-and-construction claim of $400,000 pays about $38,000. Most ABB Lummus claims are design-and-construction claims; which schedule applies turns on how you were exposed, and sorting that out is part of the work.

Read these as one trust's share, not your whole recovery. The dollars above are what the ABB Lummus trust pays on its own. But a worker exposed during the construction of a refinery or chemical plant was surrounded by other companies' asbestos, the insulation, gaskets, packing, and refractory that filled those plants, and each of those makers may have its own trust or lawsuit. So an ABB Lummus claim is usually one piece of a recovery built across many, and the number that matters for your family is the total. Learn more about how asbestos trust claims work.

How ABB Lummus exposed workers to asbestos

Lummus made its name designing and building the big plants of the petroleum and chemical industries, refineries and petrochemical complexes, and for a shorter stretch it also manufactured feedwater heaters, heat-transfer equipment for the power industry. Its asbestos exposure came from both lines of work, and the trust treats them differently, so it's worth understanding each.

Building refineries and chemical plants. This is the larger source of claims. A refinery or petrochemical plant under construction was saturated with asbestos: miles of pipe being insulated, vessels and boilers being lagged, gaskets and packing going into every joint, refractory going into the furnaces. As the contractor designing and erecting these plants, Lummus put its own workers, and the other trades on site, in the middle of all that dust, through the years it took to build a plant. The exposure came less from a single Lummus product than from the asbestos-laden worksites Lummus created and ran.

Making feedwater heaters. From the mid-1940s until 1957, Lummus manufactured feedwater heaters at a plant in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, and the equipment, insulation, and gaskets involved could contain asbestos. This was a narrow part of its history; Lummus sold the plant in 1957 and never made the heaters again, which is why the trust values these claims separately, and lower.

Because the construction work spanned so many refineries, chemical plants, and power facilities, an ABB Lummus claim reaches workers of many trades, the pipefitters, insulators, boilermakers, and laborers who built and worked in those plants, across the petrochemical and refinery and broader construction industry sectors. And because those plants were full of other companies' asbestos, a Lummus claim is rarely the only one a worker can bring.

How the ABB Lummus bankruptcy created the asbestos trust

By the mid-2000s, as other asbestos defendants went bankrupt and the pool of companies left to sue shrank, Lummus found itself named in a rising number of asbestos lawsuits across the country. In 2006, ABB Lummus Global Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the kind that lets a business reorganize instead of shutting down. Filing didn't erase the claims. It moved them into a process built to handle them all at once.

That process runs on a part of the federal Bankruptcy Code written specifically for asbestos cases, Section 524(g). It lets a court set up a trust to take over a company's asbestos liability and issue a channeling injunction, a court order that routes every asbestos claim, the ones already filed and the ones still years from surfacing, into the trust instead of the company. From that point on, the trust pays the claims in the company's place.

ABB Lummus's trust was established in 2006, funded with about $38 million, an insurance settlement of $5 million and a $33 million payment from the company itself, to pay current and future claimants. That trust is what you file against today; the company can no longer be sued for the asbestos at issue.

The business is still going strong. Unlike many asbestos defendants, Lummus didn't disappear. It reorganized, kept operating, and the business continues today as a major process-technology company that designs and licenses refining and petrochemical technology worldwide, under new ownership and a new name but with the same century-old Lummus engineering lineage. Two things follow for your claim. The records and history behind your exposure still exist, so it can be reconstructed. And because the trust, funded years ago, is what pays these claims, filing yours takes nothing from the operating business or the people it employs today.

What the ABB Lummus trust pays, and why it's a percentage

The trust pays based on your diagnosis, scaled to how serious the disease is, with mesothelioma at the top. But ABB Lummus adds a step most trusts don't: before the disease value, it matters which kind of claim you have. A design-and-construction claim, tied to a plant Lummus built, is valued well above a feedwater-heater claim, tied to the equipment it once made. Both schedules are in the table near the top of this page.

Within whichever schedule applies, how you file decides which amount is within reach:

• Expedited Review pays the fixed scheduled value for your disease level, quickly and without negotiation.
• Individual Review weighs the specifics of your case and can pay up to the much higher maximum value. For mesothelioma we always do a thorough exposure-history investigation to determine whether filing Individual Review is warranted, because the gap between the scheduled and maximum value is large enough to matter to your family. In rare cases where someone's exposure came overwhelmingly from Lummus, the trust's Extraordinary Claim process can pay more still.

Whichever path you file, the trust doesn't pay the full value of the claim. It pays a percentage of it, currently 9.5%, a fraction of each dollar of a claim's value.

That number is there for the same reason it's there in every bankruptcy: when a company can't cover everything it owes, the law shares what there is across everyone it harmed, so that everyone gets a fair portion instead of a lucky few collecting in full and everyone else collecting nothing. An asbestos trust has to do that across time as well, because these diseases can take thirty to fifty years to surface, so the trust holds back enough for the people who haven't been diagnosed yet.

The percentage can change over time as the trust's finances and claim projections shift. We work from whatever it's paying when your claim is filed, and we confirm it against the trust's current notice rather than any figure that might be out of date.

Is the ABB Lummus trust still able to pay?

Yes, and it's in steady shape. A trust that pays a small percentage can leave people wondering whether there's much left, so here's where it stands from its most recent annual report.

• About $15 million on hand, and it grew in 2025. At the end of 2025 the trust held roughly $15 million in net assets, and the figure ticked up over the year, because its investment income ran ahead of what it paid in claims and costs.
• Paying well within its limits. The trust works under an annual payment cap, about $1 million for 2025, and it paid only about half a million, so roughly a million dollars rolled forward into 2026. It's comfortably keeping pace with the claims coming in, not straining against its funds.
• Modest, and sized to a narrow liability. Lummus's asbestos exposure was a limited part of its business, so its trust is small next to the big insulation and boiler trusts. That's the scale matching the liability, not a sign of trouble.

A small trust does have less cushion than a large one, which is one more reason an ABB Lummus claim is best pursued as part of a broader recovery. But the trust is open, funded, and paying right now, and a claim filed today is paid on the current schedule.

Who qualifies for an ABB Lummus trust claim

A trust claim rests on two things: a qualifying asbestos diagnosis, and proof of exposure to ABB Lummus asbestos during your career. With Lummus there's an extra question that shapes the value of the claim: which kind of Lummus exposure you had.

Which kind of claim you have. This is the question that most affects what a Lummus claim is worth. A design-and-construction claim comes from exposure during Lummus's building or designing of a refinery or chemical plant, and these are the more common and higher-valued claims. A feedwater-heater claim comes from exposure to the heaters Lummus made at Honesdale before 1957, and these are valued much lower. Most people fall into the first group, but the line isn't always obvious, and getting it right matters, so we work it out from the job history rather than leaving it to chance.

For mesothelioma, you don't need heavy exposure. Mesothelioma can come from brief, limited exposure, and the trust recognizes that: a meso claim needs a diagnosis and documented Lummus exposure, without the higher dose threshold that applies to the other diseases. That threshold, Significant Occupational Exposure (SOE), is about five years of total asbestos exposure, and the lung cancers, other cancers, and asbestosis levels generally require it along with at least six months of Lummus exposure and supporting medical findings. SOE can add up across different jobs and employers, and it can come from working near the dust, not only from handling the material yourself.

Family members can qualify too. If a Lummus worker, or a tradesman exposed on a Lummus job site, brought the dust home, a spouse who laundered the work clothes or a child in the household can file on the worker's exposure history, the same history that supports the worker's own claim. Learn more about take-home or secondary asbestos exposure.

How the trust's two site lists work

Which schedule applies turns on how you were exposed, and the trust proves each one a different way, through two separate site lists. Neither depends on you naming a product.

For design-and-construction claims, the list is the refineries and chemical plants Lummus built or designed, more than 200 of them across 33 states. Lummus was the contractor that constructed the plant, so the list places its asbestos work where you were. For feedwater heater claims, there's a second list, more than 200 worksites where its Honesdale-made heaters were installed. This is the part that surprises people: even though the heater was a manufactured machine, the trust doesn't ask you to identify it as a Lummus product. The feedwater claim is site-based too, established by the worksite appearing on that list, not by product identification. If you can't prove which company made the heater you worked around, that doesn't cost you the claim; the list does that work.

Being at a listed site isn't the same as being exposed, though, and the trust asks both questions: whether Lummus asbestos was present, and whether the work you did would have put its fiber in your air. On the construction side, Lummus built refineries and chemical plants laced with high-temperature asbestos pipe covering and block insulation, and that material released fiber when it was cut and fitted during the build and, most of all, when old, heat-degraded covering was stripped out during later repair and turnaround, turning friable (crumbly and dusty) material into airborne dust. On the feedwater side, the heaters were insulated equipment, and the same tear-out and re-insulation work released fiber around them. Whether you did that work yourself or worked alongside the tradesmen who did, we use the exposure record on those materials, together with your work history, to connect your tasks to exposure from Lummus's asbestos. The list puts Lummus's work at your site; the task evidence is what ties it to you.

Not finding your site on either list doesn't disqualify you. A plant Lummus built or a site where its heaters ran may be missing, or recorded under an owner or a name that has since changed. It means we document the exposure another way, through work history, plant and contract records, and coworkers' accounts. We check both site lists first, but we don't stop there. You can also search our directory of asbestos exposure sites to see whether the place you worked is already documented.

How an ABB Lummus claim gets filed

A trust claim isn't a lawsuit, and that surprises people who expect a courtroom. There's no judge, no jury, no deposition, and no defense lawyer arguing the other side. You're not suing anyone. You're submitting a documented claim to a fund that already exists to pay it, and the trust reviews it against its written rules and pays on its schedule.

What the claim needs is proof of two things: your diagnosis, and your exposure to ABB Lummus asbestos during the covered period. Putting that together is our job, not yours. We gather the medical records, reconstruct the work history, identify which Lummus schedule fits your exposure, and choose the review track, Expedited or Individual Review, that suits your situation. You don't need to have kept paperwork or remember product names to start.

The ABB Lummus trust has been open and paying since its creation in 2006 and is still accepting claims today, so the door isn't closed. The fuller mechanics of how trust claims are prepared, filed, and paid are laid out in our guide to how asbestos trust claims work. When you call, we'll tell you what your specific claim is likely to involve and how the timeline tends to run.

An ABB Lummus claim is rarely the only one

Here's the part that changes the math for most families: the ABB Lummus trust is usually one claim among several, and the others come from the same work.

A refinery or chemical plant is built out of other companies' asbestos: the insulation on the pipes, the gaskets in the joints, the packing in the pumps, the refractory in the furnaces, made by dozens of manufacturers. A worker exposed during the construction or operation of a Lummus-built plant breathed all of it, not just whatever traces back to Lummus. Many of those makers went bankrupt and left their own trusts, so the same work history that supports your Lummus claim usually supports a series of others, and because each trust reviews and pays independently, the claims don't compete. They add up.

This is why the thorough exposure investigation is worth so much. Each trust pays its own fraction, and most pay modestly on their own, but a work history that turns up many trusts instead of a few can change the total on a mesothelioma claim by a wide margin. We walk through a full worked example, several trusts totaled across one career, in our guide to mesothelioma trust settlement values.

Even stacked across many trusts, trust claims are still only one part of an ABB Lummus recovery, and some of the other parts can be larger. The full set of channels, including the lawsuits and benefits that run alongside the trusts, is laid out in the recovery options on this page.

Sources of compensation beyond the ABB Lummus trust

An ABB Lummus claim usually sits inside a larger recovery, and the channels run in parallel without canceling one another out. We file across all of them that apply.

• Asbestos bankruptcy trusts. ABB Lummus is one, and a working life on refinery and plant construction almost always reaches several others, the makers of the insulation, gaskets, packing, and refractory that filled those sites. They review and pay independently, so they stack. Learn more about asbestos trust claims.
• Lawsuits against solvent manufacturers. Not every asbestos maker went bankrupt. The makers of the products at your worksites that are still in business can be sued directly for selling a product they knew was dangerous, and a lawsuit can recover more than a trust claim, though it takes longer. Learn more about asbestos product liability lawsuits.
• Premises liability against the site owners. The oil companies and chemical producers that owned the refineries and plants can be held responsible for the conditions on their sites, separate from the contractor that built them and the companies that made the products. Learn more about premises liability lawsuits.
• Federal and disability benefits. These depend on where and how the work was done, and they're paid on top of the trust and lawsuit recovery. Military service can support VA disability benefits, civilian shipyard work can support Longshore benefits (LHWCA, the federal program for maritime and harbor workers), civilian work at a federal facility can support FECA benefits (the Federal Employees' Compensation Act), and Social Security disability is available to anyone whose illness stops them from working. Learn about asbestos disability and benefit claims.

Your ABB Lummus trust claim has no defenses to answer. It's a paper claim: no opposing lawyer, no deposition, no courtroom, no one arguing the other side. ABB Lummus settled that question when the trust was funded, and the trust either pays the claim or it doesn't, on its written rules.

Defenses only come up on the lawsuit side, the claims that run alongside the trust against the companies still in business that made the products at your worksites and the owners of the plants themselves. Those defendants raise the same handful of arguments they raise in most asbestos cases, and none of them is new to us. The short version is that each one describes a cleaner, smaller version of the work than the one your loved one actually did, and the evidence answers it.