Combustion Engineering Asbestos Trust Claims

If you or someone in your family worked around Combustion Engineering boilers, or handled the company's refractory and insulating products, and later developed mesothelioma or another asbestos disease, the company left behind a large trust built to pay these claims.

For most of the twentieth century, Combustion Engineering built the boilers and steam-generating equipment that powered Navy ships, power plants, and factories, and it made the asbestos refractory cements and insulating materials that lined and sealed them. The volume of asbestos disease eventually drove the company and its parent into bankruptcy, and the reorganization set aside about $1.24 billion in a trust that's been paying mesothelioma and other asbestos claims since 2006. That trust is still open and still paying.

You don't need to have kept your old records, and you don't need to remember the model of the boiler or which product you handled. The trust pays on documented exposure to Combustion Engineering asbestos before 1983, and reconstructing that from your work history and military records is our job, not yours. If you can tell us where you worked and when, we have a place to start.

What the Combustion Engineering trust pays by disease

Mesothelioma sits at the top of the Combustion Engineering schedule (Level VIII): a scheduled value of $75,000, and up to $400,000 through the trust's evidence-based Individual Review track. Because that gap is wide, we always do a thorough exposure-history investigation to determine whether filing Individual Review is warranted. These are the trust's set values before its payment percentage is applied, and the trust recently lowered that percentage, so the amount that reaches a family is a share of these figures and is usually one part of a larger recovery.

These are the trust's values for domestic (U.S.) claims, before the payment percentage. Lung cancer is split into two levels by exposure and smoking history, and lung cancer 2 (Level VI) is paid only through Individual Review, so it carries no scheduled value. Levels II and III pay their scheduled amount with no separate average or maximum, and Level I is a fixed cash payment.

A trust's schedule shows what one trust assigns to a diagnosis, not what a whole case is worth. Most people exposed to Combustion Engineering asbestos were around other companies' products too, which usually means other trusts and often lawsuits on top of this one. The Combustion Engineering share is one part of that larger picture, and we explain below why it's rarely the only one.

How Combustion Engineering products exposed workers to asbestos

Combustion Engineering built boilers. From early in the twentieth century, it was one of the country's largest makers of the big steam-generating boilers and power systems that raised steam for Navy ships, electric power plants, and heavy industry. It also made the asbestos materials that went in and around that equipment, including refractory cements and insulating products. A boiler that runs that hot has to be sealed, lined, and insulated, and for most of the century the material the industry used to do that was asbestos.

The exposure came from two directions, and Combustion Engineering sat on both sides of it:

• The equipment itself. The boiler shell, steam drums, and connected piping were covered in asbestos block and pipe insulation, the jacket the trade called lagging; every flanged joint had an asbestos gasket and every valve asbestos packing; and the firebox was lined with asbestos-bearing refractory. None of it released much fiber sitting still. It got into the air every time the equipment was built or serviced, when insulation was cut to fit, gaskets were scraped off a flange, or old lagging was torn out to reach a leak. See how asbestos pipe and block insulation caused exposure, and how asbestos gaskets and packing caused exposure.
• The refractory and insulating products. Combustion Engineering also made asbestos refractory cements and insulating materials as products in their own right, the kind that masons and furnace crews mixed, troweled, gunned into place, and later tore out. Handling and mixing those dry materials raised fiber directly. See how asbestos insulating cement caused exposure.

The men doing that work breathed it directly, and so did everyone working near them in the boiler room. That's why a Combustion Engineering claim reaches across several trades: the boilermakers who erected and repaired the boilers, the pipefitters who ran the connected lines, and the insulators who lagged them all worked in the same dust, alongside the Navy sailors and the power generation crews who tended the equipment for a living. Shipyard and maritime work carried especially heavy exposure, because boiler and engine rooms packed all of it into tight, unventilated spaces. And the dust came home on work clothes to the families who laundered them.

How the Combustion Engineering bankruptcy created the asbestos trust

Combustion Engineering had made asbestos-bearing boilers, refractory, and insulating products for decades. In 1990, the global engineering group ABB (Asea Brown Boveri) acquired the company and, with it, responsibility for Combustion Engineering's asbestos liability. Asbestos was out of the products by then, but because these diseases can take decades to appear, the lawsuits kept coming, eventually numbering in the tens of thousands. In February 2003, Combustion Engineering filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the kind that lets a business reorganize rather than shut down, and after a contested few years the plan became effective in April 2006.

Asbestos bankruptcies are resolved through a part of the law written for exactly this problem, Section 524(g) of the Bankruptcy Code. It lets a court set up a trust to take over a company's asbestos liability, then issue a channeling injunction, a court order routing every asbestos claim, the filed ones and the ones not yet brought, into the trust instead of the company. The company funds the trust up front, and in return it and its parent are protected from being sued over asbestos again. Through that process the trust was funded with about $1.24 billion, made up of cash, ABB stock, and insurance settlements. The trust began paying claims in 2006, and that's what you file against today.

Combustion Engineering no longer operates as an independent company. ABB, the parent that funded the trust, is a large, thriving global company, and Combustion Engineering's boiler business was later sold and is now part of GE's power operations, which still services boilers of that kind. That matters for two reasons. The records and history behind your exposure still exist, and because the trust, not any operating business, pays these claims, filing yours doesn't take a dollar from anyone working there today. Any products carrying the old names now are asbestos-free and have no connection to the old liability or the trust. The claims here concern the asbestos products Combustion Engineering made decades ago.

What the Combustion Engineering trust pays, and why it's a percentage

The trust offers two filing tracks. Expedited Review is the fast path: if your diagnosis and exposure fit the trust's preset criteria, the claim is paid the fixed scheduled value for your disease level. Individual Review is the evidence-based path: the trust weighs the specifics of your case and can pay up to the higher maximum value. For mesothelioma the gap between the scheduled and maximum values is large, which is why we always do a thorough exposure-history investigation to determine whether filing Individual Review is warranted.

Whichever track you file, the trust doesn't pay the full value of a claim. It pays a percentage of it, currently 15.3%, which the trust reduced in early 2026 from 20%.

The reason there's a percentage at all is the same principle behind every bankruptcy: when a company can't cover everything it owes, the law spreads what exists across everyone it harmed, so a few don't collect in full while everyone else gets nothing. An asbestos trust has to do that across decades, holding back enough for the families who won't be diagnosed for years. The scale of that job here is large: Combustion Engineering's products reached an enormous number of people, and the trust has received hundreds of thousands of claims over its life. Even a fund of more than a billion dollars couldn't pay all of them in full and still have anything left for the future, so the trust pays a set share of each claim instead.

The percentage isn't fixed forever, and here it moved down. On its consultant's advice, the trustees lowered the rate in early 2026 so the remaining fund would stretch across the claims still to come. That's the trust protecting future claimants, not a sign the door is closing, but it does mean the per-claim figure is modest, and it's the main reason a Combustion Engineering claim is almost never filed alone. We work from whatever the trust is 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 Combustion Engineering trust still able to pay?

Yes. It's a mature trust that has already paid an enormous number of claims, and it's now managing its remaining funds carefully so it can keep paying. Here's the picture from its most recent annual report.

• About $385 million on hand. At the end of 2025 the trust held roughly $385 million in net assets, in cash and investments.
• Hundreds of thousands of claims paid. Since 2006 the trust has paid more than 275,000 claims, and it paid about $39 million to claimants in 2025 alone.
• It's managing for the long haul. The trust now pays out more in a year than its investments earn, so it caps how much it pays annually and recently lowered its payment percentage, both to keep the fund available for the claims still coming.

A fund this size isn't unlimited, and the steps above, the annual cap and the lower percentage, are exactly how the trust keeps its promise to the people who haven't been diagnosed yet. But the trust is open, funded, and paying right now, and a claim filed today is paid at the current percentage. We track the annual reporting and can walk through the full financial picture with you when you call.

Who qualifies for a Combustion Engineering trust claim

A claim rests on two things: a qualifying asbestos diagnosis, and documented exposure to Combustion Engineering asbestos during the period the trust covers. The diagnosis side is medical. The exposure side is where the trust's rules come in, and where most of our work happens.

The exposure has to fall before the end of 1982. The trust pays on exposure before December 31, 1982, the period when these products carried asbestos. Most careers around this equipment ran straight through that window, so the date is rarely the obstacle people fear. We explain your options if your exposure came later in our guide to how asbestos trust claims work.

For mesothelioma, you don't need heavy exposure. Mesothelioma can come from brief, limited exposure, and the trust recognizes that, so a meso claim isn't held to the higher-dose threshold that applies to the other disease levels. Those higher levels, the lung cancer and severe asbestosis levels, ask for about six months of Combustion Engineering exposure plus Significant Occupational Exposure, roughly five years of asbestos work that can add up across different jobs. That includes time spent working in close proximity to others doing the dusty work, not only doing it yourself, which matters in a boiler room where one crew's dust filled the space.

There are two ways to show exposure, and you don't need to remember the product. Because Combustion Engineering kept records of where its boilers went, the trust maintains lists of the land-based sites and the ships where CE boilers were installed, and working at a listed site or serving aboard a listed ship makes exposure straightforward to establish. If your site or ship isn't listed, that doesn't disqualify you; the claim goes the traditional route instead, with product identification supported by affidavits and records. People rarely kept track of which company made the boiler they serviced decades ago, and the claim doesn't depend on your having done so. Sorting out which sites, ships, and products fit your history is our job.

Family members can qualify too. If a worker brought Combustion Engineering dust home, a spouse who laundered the work clothes or a child in the household may file on the same exposure history.

How the trust's site and ship lists work

Combustion Engineering sold big, installed boilers, the kind a power plant, factory, or Navy ship has put in and runs for decades. Equipment like that came with a paper trail, so the company knew where its boilers were delivered and installed. The trust built those records into two lists: the land-based sites where CE boilers were installed, and the ships that carried them. Between them, the trust recognizes more than 7,900 approved sites, spanning all fifty states and the District of Columbia. If you worked at a listed site or served aboard a listed ship during the covered period, that part is straightforward, and the ship list especially helps Navy veterans who can name the vessel even when they can't name the boiler. But finding yourself on a list is the starting point of a claim, not the whole of it.

Being at a site where a CE boiler was installed, or aboard a ship that carried one, isn't the same as being exposed to the asbestos on it, and the trust asks both questions: whether Combustion Engineering asbestos was present, and whether the work you did would have put its fiber in your air. A CE boiler was a big steel machine, but the asbestos was in the insulation and block lagging wrapped around it, the refractory brick and castable lining the firebox, and the gaskets and packing at its doors and fittings. And the boiler wasn't the only way CE's asbestos reached a worksite: Combustion Engineering also made and sold asbestos refractory cement and insulating block as products in their own right, so the same fiber turned up in the hands of workers who never installed or serviced a CE boiler. That material released fiber when it was cut, mixed, and fitted during installation and, most of all, when old, heat-degraded insulation and lining were torn out during repair, re-bricking, and teardown, turning friable (crumbly and dusty) material into airborne dust. Whether you did that work yourself or worked alongside the boilermakers, insulators, and pipefitters who did, we use the exposure record on those materials, together with your work history, to connect your tasks to exposure from Combustion Engineering's boilers and materials. The list puts CE's work at your site; the task evidence is what ties it to you.

The lists aren't the whole story, though, and this is where people wrongly count themselves out. A boiler installed at one plant in one decade might have run for years at a site that later changed hands and names, and plenty of workers breathed Combustion Engineering asbestos at locations the original records don't capture. Not appearing on a list doesn't disqualify you. It means the claim goes through traditional product identification, where we document the exposure with work history, service and equipment records, military records, and coworkers' accounts. We check the lists first, but we don't stop there, because they capture where the boilers were sent, not everywhere they ended up or everyone who worked around them. You can also search our directory of asbestos exposure sites to see whether the place you worked is already documented.

How a Combustion Engineering claim gets filed

A trust claim isn't a lawsuit. There's no judge, no jury, no deposition, and no defense lawyer on the other side. You submit a documented claim to a fund that 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 Combustion Engineering asbestos before the cutoff, and putting that together is our work, not yours. We gather the medical records, reconstruct the work history, and choose the track that fits.

The trust is open and still accepting claims, so the door isn't closed. Because it limits how much it pays in any one year, the timing of payment can stretch when demand is high, which is one more reason to file promptly rather than wait. The fuller mechanics of how trust claims are prepared, filed, and paid are in our guide to how asbestos trust claims work. When you call, we'll tell you what your specific claim is likely to involve.

A Combustion Engineering claim is rarely the only one

The Combustion Engineering share is one part of a recovery, almost never the whole of it, and the reason is the nature of the work.

Start with a single boiler. Combustion Engineering built it, but the company didn't make everything on it. The insulation wrapped around it, the gaskets at its joints, the packing in its valves, and some of the cement on its fittings came from other manufacturers, several of which went bankrupt too and left their own trusts. So even the boiler at the center of your claim was usually covered in other companies' asbestos, and each of those products can be a separate claim. Stretch that across a working life, different jobs, plants, and equipment, and the same history that supports your Combustion Engineering claim usually supports a stack of others. Because each trust reviews and pays independently, the claims add up rather than compete.

That's why the thorough exposure investigation is worth so much here, where the per-claim figure is modest. A work history that turns up several trusts, plus lawsuits against the makers still in business, can carry a mesothelioma case well past what any single trust pays. The other large boiler maker, Babcock & Wilcox, often appears in the same work history, and so does the ABB Lummus trust, which shares Combustion Engineering's former parent. We walk through a worked example, several trusts totaled across one career, in our guide to mesothelioma trust settlement values.

Sources of compensation beyond the Combustion Engineering trust

A Combustion Engineering 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. The Combustion Engineering trust is one, and a boiler or industrial career almost always reaches several others, the makers of the insulation, gaskets, packing, and cement on the same equipment. They review and pay independently, so they stack. How asbestos trust claims work.
• Lawsuits against solvent manufacturers. Not every asbestos maker went bankrupt. Many, especially in the gasket and packing world, are still in business and 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. How asbestos product liability lawsuits work.
• Premises liability against the site owners. The shipyards, power plants, refineries, and mills that ran Combustion Engineering boilers can be held responsible for the conditions in their boiler and engine rooms, separate from the companies that made the products. How premises liability claims work.
• Federal and disability benefits. These depend on where and how the work was done, and they're paid on top of the rest. Navy 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. How asbestos disability and benefit claims work.

Your Combustion Engineering 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. The company settled that question when it funded the trust, 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 manufacturers still in business and the site owners where you worked. Those defendants raise the same handful of arguments they raise in most asbestos cases, and none of them is new to us.