Brauer Supply Asbestos Trust Claims

If you or someone in your family worked around asbestos insulation in and around St. Louis and later developed mesothelioma or another asbestos disease, the company that supplied much of that insulation, Brauer Supply, left behind a trust built to pay exactly these claims.

For decades, Brauer Supply was the middleman. It didn't dig asbestos out of the ground or run the plants where people got sick; it was the St. Louis supply house that bought industrial and commercial insulation from the big manufacturers and distributed it across the region, to refineries, power plants, factories, and the contractors who installed it. Its insulation division, added in the 1950s, carried asbestos-containing pipe and block insulation into the 1970s. The workers who cut, fit, and tore out that insulation breathed the fiber, and most of them never knew Brauer's name, because a wholesaler's product arrives on a job already in someone else's hands. The volume of asbestos sickness eventually drove the company into bankruptcy, and its reorganization required it to set up a trust that's been paying mesothelioma and other asbestos claims since 2006. That trust is still open, and it's still paying.

You don't need to have kept records, and you don't need to remember that the insulation came through Brauer. Most people never did. The trust pays on documented exposure to Brauer-supplied asbestos at a qualifying worksite, and reconstructing that, from work history and the trust's own records of where it sent product, is our job, not yours. If you can tell us where you worked and when, we have a place to start.

What the Brauer Supply trust pays

For mesothelioma, the Brauer trust's scheduled value is $125,000, and a claim taken through Individual Review can reach as high as $250,000. Those are the trust's full values, before its payment percentage is applied, which we explain further down. Mesothelioma sits at the top of the trust's four-level schedule:

Two things to keep in mind reading that table. First, every figure is reduced by the trust's payment percentage before it reaches you, which is how the fund stretches across the people still to be diagnosed; we explain that below. Second, and more important, the Brauer trust is rarely the only claim a person has. Because Brauer distributed other companies' insulation, the same exposure that supports a Brauer claim usually supports claims against several other trusts too, and those add up. For many people the Brauer claim is one modest piece of a much larger recovery.

How Brauer Supply's products exposed workers to asbestos

Brauer Supply didn't make asbestos. It sold and distributed it. The company started in St. Louis in 1881 as a parts house for heating stoves, grew into a regional distributor of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning equipment, and in the 1950s added an insulation division. From then into the 1970s, that division carried asbestos-containing thermal insulation, the pipe covering and block insulation used to hold heat on industrial and commercial systems, and distributed it across the St. Louis area and the surrounding region.

Insulation like that doesn't release much fiber sitting on a warehouse shelf or wrapped intact around a pipe. It gets into the air when someone works it: cutting and fitting pipe covering to length, troweling or sanding insulating cement onto fittings, and above all tearing out old, friable (crumbly and dusty) insulation to reach the line underneath. See how asbestos pipe and block insulation caused exposure.

Because Brauer was a supplier, its asbestos reached people in two ways. Some worked at Brauer's own insulation operation, handling and fabricating the material. Far more breathed it downstream, on the job sites where the insulation ended up: the insulators who installed and stripped it, the pipefitters and plumbers who cut into it to reach their lines, the sheet-metal and HVAC workers who built the systems it wrapped, and everyone working alongside them in the same boiler rooms and mechanical spaces. None of them had to know the insulation came through Brauer to breathe what came off it.

That's also why a Brauer claim is rarely a claim about Brauer alone. The insulation it distributed was made by the major asbestos manufacturers, and the same job that exposed a worker to Brauer-supplied product usually exposed him to those makers' products directly. We come back to that below, because it's where most of the recovery is.

How the Brauer Supply bankruptcy created the asbestos trust

By the time asbestos litigation caught up with Brauer, the company faced thousands of claims from people exposed to the insulation it had distributed. Like many companies in that position, it used Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the kind that lets a business reorganize instead of shutting down, together with a part of the bankruptcy law written specifically for asbestos, Section 524(g).

That section lets a court set up a trust to take over a company's asbestos liability and then issue a channeling injunction, a court order that routes every asbestos claim, the ones already filed and the ones that haven't surfaced yet, away from the company and into the trust. The trade is straightforward: the company funds the trust, and in return it's protected from being sued over asbestos again. The bankruptcy court approved Brauer's plan and established the trust in 2006.

Brauer funded the trust differently from the big manufacturers, and it matters less to your claim than you might think. Rather than a single large endowment, the trust was funded with a payment from the company plus the proceeds of Brauer's old insurance policies, which the trust collected over the years that followed. It's a smaller fund than the household-name trusts, sized to a regional supplier rather than a national maker. What that means in practice is that the per-claim values are modest and the payment percentage matters, which is why, for most people, a Brauer claim is one piece of a recovery built across several trusts. We come back to that below.

The company is still in business today. The bankruptcy didn't shut Brauer down. The trust took on the asbestos liability, which let the company reorganize and keep operating, and Brauer Supply is still a family-run distributor in St. Louis today. That matters for two reasons. The records and history behind your exposure still exist. And because the trust, not the operating company, pays these claims, filing yours doesn't take a dollar from anyone working there now.

What the Brauer Supply trust pays, and why it's a percentage

The trust pays set amounts based on your diagnosis, scaled to how serious the disease is, with mesothelioma at the top of the schedule and the non-malignant conditions like asbestosis lower down. The full breakdown by disease is in the table near the top of this page.

How you file decides which of those amounts is within reach, because the trust offers two tracks:

• Expedited Review is the fast track. If your diagnosis and exposure fit the trust's preset criteria, the claim is paid the fixed scheduled value (the trust's set amount) for your disease level, with no negotiation and a quicker turnaround. It's the simplest path when the standard amount is the right amount.
• Individual Review is the evidence-based track. Instead of the fixed figure, the trust weighs the specifics of your case, your work history, the strength of the exposure proof, and your circumstances, and it can pay up to the much higher maximum value. It asks for more and takes longer, but for a serious diagnosis it's usually worth it. 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 the maximum value, $125,000 against $250,000, is large enough to matter to your family.

Whichever track you file, the trust doesn't pay the full value of the claim. It pays a percentage of it, currently 9.5%, a little under ten cents on each dollar of a claim's value.

That number surprises people, so here's why it's there. It's the same principle behind 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 family that won't be diagnosed until 2045.

There's a more encouraging part to Brauer's percentage, though: it has gone up, not down. The trust started out paying 2.6 cents on the dollar, raised that to 5.5%, and in 2023 raised it again to its current 9.5%, more than tripling what it pays on every claim. A trust that can raise its percentage is doing the opposite of a fund struggling to stretch what's left; it's a sign the trust has gained a clearer, healthier picture of what it can afford to pay. 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 Brauer Supply trust still able to pay?

Yes, with an honest caveat: this is a small trust, so here's the real picture from its most recent annual report rather than a reassuring headline.

• About $5.5 million on hand. At the end of 2025 the trust held roughly $5.5 million in net assets. That's a modest fund, in line with the size of the company behind it, not one of the billion-dollar manufacturer trusts.
• A percentage that's risen, not fallen. The trust has increased what it pays twice, most recently to 9.5% in 2023. A trust that raises its payout is the opposite of one running dry.
• Paying claims a little faster than it earns. In 2025 the trust paid out somewhat more in claims than its investments earned that year, so the fund dipped slightly. For a trust this age that's expected rather than alarming: it's paying down a known population of claims at a rate it has judged it can sustain, which is exactly what the raised percentage reflects.

A small fund has less cushion than a large one, and we won't pretend otherwise. What that means for you is practical: the Brauer claim is best understood as one modest piece of a larger recovery, not the whole of it. The trust is open, funded, and paying on its current schedule 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 Brauer Supply trust claim

A trust claim rests on two things: a qualifying asbestos diagnosis, and proof that you were exposed to Brauer-supplied 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 1983. The Brauer trust pays on asbestos exposure from before January 1, 1983. The reasoning traces back to when the danger became widely known and warnings went up, and we lay out that full logic, along with your options if your exposure came later, in our guide to how asbestos trust claims work. Most careers around this insulation ran straight through that window, so the date is rarely the obstacle people fear.

For mesothelioma, you don't need heavy exposure. Mesothelioma can come from brief, limited exposure, and the trust recognizes that. A Brauer meso claim asks for credible exposure to Brauer-supplied asbestos before 1983 and nothing more; it doesn't have to clear the higher dose threshold that applies to the other diseases. That threshold, Significant Occupational Exposure (SOE), is about five years of total asbestos work with at least two of those years before 1983, and it applies to lung cancer, the other cancers, and the more serious asbestosis claims. Importantly, SOE counts work done near the dust, not only handling the material yourself, so a tradesman who worked in the same spaces as the insulators qualifies on the same footing. The base asbestos-disease level pays its set amount without it.

The trust won't pay on a name alone. Its rules are explicit that a claim has to rest on real exposure to an actual Brauer product, not on the bare fact that the company was once named in asbestos litigation. In practice that's a low bar for anyone who worked around this insulation, and documenting that exposure is exactly what we do.

Family members can qualify too. If a Brauer worker 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. How take-home asbestos exposure works.

How the trust's exposure-site records work

Because Brauer was a supplier, it kept records of where it sent its asbestos products, and the trust built those into a list of worksites it already accepts as places where Brauer asbestos was present, mostly industrial, commercial, and institutional sites across the St. Louis region. If you worked at one of those sites during the covered period, that part is straightforward. But that's the starting point of a claim, not the whole of it.

Being at a listed site isn't the same as being exposed to Brauer's product there. The trust asks both questions: whether Brauer asbestos was present, and whether the work you did would have put it in your air. So we look at what you actually did, and at the work going on around you. Brauer supplied asbestos insulation and related materials, and that material released fiber when it was cut and fitted and, most of all, when old, heat-degraded insulation was torn out, turning friable (crumbly and dusty) material into airborne dust. Whether you handled the material yourself or worked alongside the tradesmen who did, we use the exposure record on asbestos pipe covering and block insulation, together with your work history, to connect your tasks to exposure from Brauer's product. Presence puts the product at your site; the task evidence is what ties it to you.

The list isn't the whole story, though, and this is where people wrongly count themselves out. Brauer's product moved through wholesale channels and ended up at sites that never show up in its own delivery records, and plenty of workers breathed it at locations the list doesn't name. Not appearing on the list doesn't disqualify you. It routes the claim to Individual Review, where we document the exposure with work history, purchase and specification records, and coworkers' accounts rather than relying on the list alone. We check the list 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 a Brauer Supply 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 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 Brauer asbestos during the covered period. Putting that together is our job, not yours. We gather the medical records, reconstruct the work history, match it against the trust's records, and choose the track, Expedited or Individual Review, that fits your situation. You don't need to have kept paperwork or remember product names to start.

The Brauer Supply trust has been open and paying since 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.

A Brauer Supply claim is rarely the only one

Here's the part that changes the math for most families: the Brauer trust is usually one claim out of several, and the others come from the very same work.

Start with what Brauer actually was. It didn't manufacture insulation; it distributed insulation that the major asbestos companies made. So the pipe covering and block insulation that exposed a worker to Brauer-supplied product was, at that same moment, exposing him to the products of the companies that made it, and several of those manufacturers went bankrupt too and left their own trusts. The single act of cutting into a length of asbestos pipe covering can support a claim against the maker's trust and the Brauer trust both.

Now stretch that across a career. A working life around industrial and commercial insulation meant different job sites, different systems, and insulation from many different makers, every one of them a potential trust. The same history that supports your Brauer claim usually supports a stack of others, and because each trust reviews and pays independently, the claims don't compete with each other. They add up. How asbestos trust claims work.

This matters more for a Brauer claim than for most, precisely because Brauer is a small trust. On its own, a Brauer claim is modest. As one strand in a recovery built across the makers whose insulation it carried, plus the lawsuits and benefits that can run alongside, it's part of something much larger. We walk through a full worked example, several trusts totaled across one career, in our guide to mesothelioma trust settlement values. The full set of channels beyond the trusts is laid out next.

Sources of compensation beyond the Brauer Supply trust

A Brauer 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. Brauer is one, and as the section above explains, the insulation behind a Brauer claim almost always reaches several other trusts too. They review and pay independently, so they stack. How asbestos trust claims work.
• Lawsuits against solvent manufacturers. Not every company that made the insulation Brauer distributed went bankrupt. Some are still in business and can be sued directly for making and 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 refineries, plants, utilities, and other operations where this insulation was installed can be held responsible for the conditions they allowed, separate from the companies that made or supplied 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 trust and lawsuit recovery. Civilian work at a federal facility can support FECA benefits (the Federal Employees' Compensation Act); military service, including at the region's aircraft and defense plants, can support VA disability benefits; and Social Security disability is available to anyone whose illness stops them from working. How asbestos disability and benefit claims work.

Your Brauer 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. Brauer 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. 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.