Durabla Asbestos Trust Claims

If you or someone in your family worked with gaskets and packing, cutting them, fitting them, scraping the old ones off industrial equipment, and later developed mesothelioma or another asbestos disease, Durabla may be part of the story. It made the sheet gaskets and packing that sealed pumps, valves, and machinery, and for decades that material was asbestos, some of it more than 80% asbestos by weight. The dust came off it every time a gasket was cut to fit or a worn one was scraped away.

There's a Durabla bankruptcy trust, and you can file a claim against it. We want to be straight with you about it, though, because it's an unusual one. The trust is small, and it's still in the early stages: it has been taking in claims, but it hasn't yet begun paying them or set the rate at which it will. So a Durabla claim, on its own, isn't where the recovery in one of these cases usually comes from. Its real value is as one piece of a larger picture, because almost anyone exposed to Durabla's gaskets and packing was exposed to a good deal of other asbestos too, and that broader history is what these cases are built on.

You don't need to remember brand names or have your old records. Reconstructing the exposure, Durabla's and everything alongside it, is our job, not yours.

What the Durabla trust is set up to pay

The Durabla trust has a disease schedule, shown below, but two things shape what it means in practice. First, the values are modest. Second, and more important, the trust has not yet set its payment percentage, the share of each claim's value it will actually pay, so the final amount a claim would bring isn't fixed yet. We explain why below.

Those figures are smaller than at most asbestos trusts, which reflects a small fund facing a very large number of claims. Whatever percentage the trust eventually sets will be applied on top of them. That's the honest reason a Durabla claim is almost never pursued on its own: it's filed as one part of a portfolio, and the weight of the recovery sits elsewhere. We get into that below, because for most people it's the part that matters.

How Durabla's gaskets and packing exposed workers

Durabla, founded in 1911, was a sealing-products maker. Its main business was sheet gaskets, gasket material sold in large sheets that workers cut or punched to fit a flange, a pump, or a valve, along with sheet packing for sealing rotating and moving parts. To make those products hold against heat and pressure, Durabla used asbestos, and it kept using it for decades, with some of its packing running more than 80% asbestos by weight.

Intact, installed gaskets aren't where the exposure came from. It came from working the material:

• Cutting and punching gaskets to fit. Sheet gasket stock was cut and punched to shape on the job, which sent fiber into the air on every piece.
• Scraping out the old ones. Taking equipment apart meant scraping the old gasket off the faces, often baked hard by heat, with a scraper, wire brush, or grinder, the dustiest part of the work.
• Cutting and seating packing. Cutting asbestos packing to length and seating it released fiber directly, and the high-asbestos packing released a lot.
• Breathing a neighbor's dust, and carrying it home. The workers sharing the shop or the machinery space breathed the same air, and the dust came home on clothes to the families who laundered them.

Because gaskets and packing are in almost every kind of industrial equipment, the exposure reached the trades that build and maintain it: pipefitters and steamfitters, boilermakers, machinists, mechanics, factory and plant workers, and Navy personnel who worked shipboard machinery. The work that released the fiber, cutting, punching, and scraping gaskets and packing, is the same work documented on our asbestos gaskets and packing page, where the air-measurement figures live.

How the Durabla bankruptcy created the trust, and where it stands

Durabla Manufacturing Company made sheet gaskets and packing from the early 1900s, with a Canadian affiliate, Durabla Canada Ltd., founded in the 1920s. Asbestos lawsuits mounted over the decades, and the company wound down its business in the 2000s. Durabla Manufacturing filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2009, and Durabla Canada followed in 2010. The plan was confirmed in 2012, and the trust took effect that September, set up under Section 524(g) of the Bankruptcy Code, the law that lets a court route a bankrupt company's asbestos claims, present and future, into a trust that takes over the liability.

Here is where the Durabla trust is different from most, and where we'll be candid. The trust began accepting claims in 2020, and it did so under a structure built for a small fund facing a large, uncertain number of claims: an initial period to receive and count the claims first, during which none would be paid, before deciding the percentage of each claim's value the trust could sustain over its life. That counting period has closed, the trust has taken in tens of thousands of claims, and it holds a fund in the range of $18 million. It has not yet set the payment percentage or begun paying claims. So a claim filed today is on record and preserved, but the date it pays, and the amount, aren't established yet.

That's an honest limitation, and it's exactly why the rest of this page focuses on where the recovery actually comes from.

Why the Durabla trust hasn't set what it pays, and why filing still matters

Every asbestos trust has the same hard job: make a limited fund last across decades, so the people diagnosed years from now are treated like the people filing today. A trust does that by paying each claim a set percentage of its value rather than paying the early claims in full and leaving nothing behind. Durabla's fund is small and the number of claims against it is large, so the trust took a cautious route, counting the claims before fixing a percentage it could keep. That percentage is still to come.

Even so, there are real reasons to get a Durabla claim on file rather than wait:

• It preserves the claim. Filing puts the claim on record and protects your place for when the trust does begin paying, instead of leaving it to be sorted out later.
• The rest of the recovery is time-sensitive. The claims that carry these cases, against other trusts and against solvent companies, run on deadlines that can be short, and they depend on the same diagnosis and exposure history. Acting on Durabla is really acting on all of it at once.

We don't pad a case with a claim that doesn't belong, and we won't oversell what Durabla will pay. What we'll do is put the Durabla claim in its place and build the recovery where it actually lives.

Who qualifies for a Durabla trust claim

A claim rests on two things: a qualifying asbestos diagnosis, and documented exposure to a Durabla asbestos product during the period the trust covers. The diagnosis side is medical. The exposure side is where the trust's rules come in.

The exposure has to fall before the end of 1982. The trust's criteria look to exposure before December 31, 1982, the heart of the period these products carried asbestos. Most careers around gaskets, packing, and industrial equipment of that era ran through that window. 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's criteria reflect 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 Durabla exposure plus Significant Occupational Exposure, roughly five years of asbestos work (with at least two of them before the end of 1982) that can add up across different jobs, including time spent working in close proximity to others doing the dusty work.

The proof is the ordinary kind. What the claim needs is credible evidence of exposure to a Durabla product, by your account, a coworker's, or a family member's, supported by whatever records exist. People rarely tracked which company made the gasket material they cut decades ago, and the claim doesn't depend on your having done so. Reconstructing it is our job.

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

Where the recovery actually comes from

This is the heart of a Durabla case, because the Durabla trust is a small piece of it.

A worker who handled Durabla gaskets and packing handled other companies' gaskets, packing, and insulation right alongside them, on the same equipment, the same jobs, and across a whole career. Many of those other makers also went bankrupt and left trusts, and unlike Durabla's, a number of those trusts are funded and paying now. Others are still in business and can be sued directly, which often recovers more than any trust claim. The same diagnosis and the same exposure history that support a Durabla claim support those, and because each trust and each lawsuit is resolved on its own, they add up rather than compete.

There's a particular wrinkle worth raising with us in a gasket case like this: Durabla's gaskets were tied to other companies in the marketplace, including a decades-long relationship distributing gasket products for a large, still-operating tire and rubber manufacturer, and juries have held makers in that position responsible for the asbestos in those gaskets. Whether that or any other solvent defendant fits your case is something we sort out from your work history.

So the honest shape of a Durabla case is this: we preserve the Durabla claim, and we build the recovery from the paying trusts and the solvent defendants that the same history opens up. We walk through a worked example, several trusts and defendants totaled across one career, in our guide to mesothelioma trust settlement values.

Sources of compensation in a Durabla case

A Durabla case usually draws on several channels at once, and they run in parallel without canceling one another out. We file across all of them that apply.

• Asbestos bankruptcy trusts. The Durabla trust is one, but the ones that carry the recovery are the other gasket, packing, and insulation makers' trusts that are funded and paying now. They review and pay independently, so they stack. How asbestos trust claims work.
• Lawsuits against solvent manufacturers. Many asbestos makers 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 plants, refineries, and yards that controlled the worksites can be held responsible for the conditions there, separate from the companies that made the products. How premises liability claims work.
• Federal and disability benefits. Social Security disability is available to anyone whose illness stops them from working, and where the work touched a shipyard or military setting, it can add Longshore benefits (LHWCA, the federal program for maritime and harbor workers) or VA disability benefits. These are paid on top of the rest. How asbestos disability and benefit claims work.

A Durabla trust claim, once the trust is paying, has no defenses to answer. A trust claim is a paper claim: no opposing lawyer, no deposition, no courtroom. Defenses come up only on the lawsuit side, the claims that run alongside the trust against the makers still in business and the site owners. Those defendants raise the same handful of arguments they raise in most asbestos cases, and none of them is new to us.