Fuller-Austin Asbestos Settlement Trust Claims

If you worked at a refinery, chemical plant, or industrial site along the Gulf Coast where Fuller-Austin handled the insulation, or if you were one of its insulators, and a mesothelioma or other asbestos diagnosis has now come in, the asbestos Fuller-Austin installed may be the reason, and the company left behind a trust built to pay these claims.

For most of the twentieth century, Fuller-Austin Insulation Company was one of the big insulation contractors across Texas and Louisiana, installing, repairing, and tearing out asbestos insulation in the refineries, petrochemical plants, and factories of the Gulf Coast. That work filled the air with asbestos dust, for Fuller-Austin's own crews and for everyone else on the job. The trust the company left behind is one of the healthier ones: it holds over $100 million, and it has done something most trusts never do, twice: it raised the share it pays on every claim from 30% to 38% in 2025, then to 45% in April 2026, and each time sent catch-up payments to people it had already paid.

You don't need to remember product names or brands to file. What matters for this trust is where you worked and how the work exposed you, because it pays on exposure at the job sites where Fuller-Austin handled asbestos. Reconstructing that from your work history is our job, not yours. The company itself stopped operating decades ago, so a claim doesn't touch anyone's job. If you can tell us where you worked and when, we have a place to start.

What the Fuller-Austin trust pays

The trust sets a single value for each of five disease categories, called the Allowed Liquidated Value. Unlike many trusts, it doesn't publish a low-to-high range; it's one figure per category, with mesothelioma at the top.

That listed value isn't the check. Like every asbestos trust, Fuller-Austin pays a percentage of the value rather than the whole of it, and that percentage is the number to watch. Right now it's 45%, which the trust raised from 38% in April 2026, so a mesothelioma claim at the $58,500 value currently comes to about $26,325. We come back to the percentage, and the unusual story behind that raise, below.

Two things matter when you read these values. First, they're modest next to the big manufacturer trusts, for a plain reason the next sections explain: Fuller-Austin was an insulation contractor, not a maker, and a contractor's trust is one piece of a claim rather than the whole of it. Second, almost no one's exposure at a Fuller-Austin site was their only asbestos exposure. The insulation Fuller-Austin installed was made by other companies, many of which left their own trusts, and a refinery or plant exposes a worker to far more asbestos than one contractor's. For most people the Fuller-Austin claim is one piece of a much larger recovery. We come back to that too.

How Fuller-Austin's work exposed workers to asbestos

Fuller-Austin didn't make asbestos, and it didn't mine it. It was a contractor and a supplier. Other companies manufactured the asbestos insulation; Fuller-Austin bought it, installed it on the pipes and vessels and boilers of Gulf Coast industry, repaired it, and tore it out when it was time to replace it. From the 1940s until the early 1970s, that insulation was loaded with asbestos, because asbestos was what the whole industry used to hold back the extreme heat of a refinery or a power plant.

Every part of that work released fiber. Cutting and fitting pipe covering, mixing the insulating cement that sealed it, sawing block insulation to size, and above all ripping out the old, dried, crumbling insulation to replace it, each step put asbestos dust into the air. A lot of it happened in the worst conditions for it: the cramped, hot, poorly ventilated process units, boiler houses, and pipe runs of refineries and chemical plants, where the dust hung in the air and was breathed by everyone in the space.

And that's the nature of a contractor's exposure: it was never limited to the contractor's own crews. When Fuller-Austin's insulators worked a unit at a refinery, the pipefitters, boilermakers, laborers, and operators working alongside them breathed the same dust. That's why the people this trust compensates are often not Fuller-Austin employees at all, but the other tradesmen who happened to share the site.

Much of the insulation Fuller-Austin's crews installed was amosite, a brown amphibole asbestos that is among the most dangerous fiber types and was prized for exactly the high-heat refinery work the company did. There's a piece of history in that fact. One of Fuller-Austin's own insulators was Clarence Borel, whose lawsuit in the early 1970s was the first to establish that asbestos manufacturers could be held responsible for failing to warn the workers who handled their products. That case opened the door to all asbestos litigation that followed, and to the wave of bankruptcies that created the trust system itself. The man whose case made these trusts possible installed the same amphibole insulation, for the same company, that this very trust now pays for. Read Clarence Borel's story and how asbestos litigation began.

To understand how insulation work caused exposure, see asbestos insulation and how it exposed workers and asbestos exposure among insulators.

How the Fuller-Austin bankruptcy created the asbestos trust

By the late 1980s, after Fuller-Austin had stopped using asbestos and was winding down, the personal-injury lawsuits began arriving by the thousands, from the workers who had handled its insulation and shared its job sites and were now falling ill. The company couldn't carry them. In September 1998 it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware, using a plan its asbestos claimants had already approved.

What came out of that bankruptcy, in December 1998, was a trust. It was set up under the part of the bankruptcy law written for asbestos, Section 524(g), which lets a court channel every asbestos claim against a company, the ones already filed and the ones still to surface decades later, into a single trust that pays them in the company's place. Fuller-Austin's was an early and closely watched use of that law. The trust was funded with the company's cash, its ownership, and above all its insurance, the right to recover from the general-liability policies the company had carried over its working life, and it was designed to be self-liquidating, paying claims over a forecast running nearly three decades.

The company itself is gone. Fuller-Austin had been bought by DynCorp in the 1970s and stopped operating in the mid-1980s, and what remains is the dormant entity the trust holds, mostly as the vehicle for those insurance rights. That's worth knowing for one reason: a Fuller-Austin claim isn't a suit against a working business and doesn't threaten anyone's job. You're filing against a fund that was set up, and set aside, specifically to pay it.

What the trust pays, and the story behind the percentage

The trust assigns each allowed claim a single Allowed Liquidated Value based on the disease, with mesothelioma at the top at $58,500. It doesn't pay that figure in full, though. Like every asbestos trust, it pays a percentage of it, so that a finite, self-liquidating fund can reach everyone it owes, including the claimants who won't be diagnosed for years.

What's unusual about Fuller-Austin is the direction that percentage has moved. Most trusts, as they age and their funds draw down, cut the percentage to make the money last. Fuller-Austin did the reverse. In September 2025 the trustees raised the payment percentage from 30% to 38%, and then went back and sent supplemental catch-up payments, roughly $10 million of them, to claimants who had been paid earlier at the lower rate. Then, effective April 1, 2026, it raised the percentage again, from 38% to 45%, with the consent of its advisory committee and legal representative, and again sent supplemental payments to claimants paid at less than 45%. That's the behavior of a trust that found itself in better financial shape than its conservative percentage assumed, and chose to pass the difference back to the people it pays. At 45%, the $58,500 mesothelioma value works out to about $26,325.

There's no separate fast track and slow track to weigh here, and no scheduled-versus-maximum decision; the value of a claim is its category's Allowed Liquidated Value, paid at the current percentage. That keeps a Fuller-Austin claim refreshingly simple. What it doesn't change is the scale: this is a contractor's trust, the values are modest, and the claim is meant to sit alongside others. We confirm the current percentage against the trust's notices when your claim is filed.

Is the Fuller-Austin asbestos trust still able to pay?

Yes, and by the usual measures it's one of the steadier trusts. Here's the picture from its most recent annual report.

• Over $100 million on hand. At the end of 2025 the trust held about $104 million in net assets. It's a substantial fund, invested and actively managed to pay claims for years to come.
• A payment percentage that went up, not down. In 2025 the trust raised its rate from 30% to 38% and sent roughly $10 million in catch-up payments to claimants paid earlier at the lower rate, and in April 2026 it raised the rate again, to 45%. The fund's net assets dipped over 2025, but that dip is mostly the cost of that generosity, a trust paying out more because it could, not a trust running short.
• A long, paying track record. Fuller-Austin has been paying claims since the late 1990s, across tens of thousands of claims and hundreds of millions of dollars over its life. It's an established, working fund, not a paper promise.

The honest framing is the same as for any contractor's trust: Fuller-Austin is solvent, well-run, and currently paying at a raised rate, but its per-claim values are modest, so the claim it pays is one piece of a larger recovery. For a refinery or insulation worker, that larger recovery is almost always there to build. The trust is open 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 picture with you when you call.

Who qualifies for a Fuller-Austin trust claim

Fuller-Austin's eligibility rules work differently from most trusts, and the difference is worth understanding, because it changes what we need from you.

A claim rests on three things: a qualifying asbestos diagnosis, a latency period, and proof of exposure at a Fuller-Austin site.

The diagnosis fits one of five categories. Mesothelioma, lung cancer, other listed cancers, asbestosis, or pleural disease, each with its own medical criteria and its own value.

At least ten years passed between first exposure and diagnosis. The trust requires a ten-year latency, meaning ten years between your first asbestos exposure and your diagnosis. Asbestos diseases almost always take far longer than that to develop, twenty to fifty years is typical for mesothelioma, so this requirement is met as a matter of course; it rarely affects a real claim.

Your exposure has to trace to a Fuller-Austin job site. This is where Fuller-Austin is unusual, and it's the part that decides most claims. The trust keeps a defined list of more than 350 project sites where it handled asbestos, most of them along the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana, with the years it was there. A qualifying claim has two parts: it places you at one of those sites during or after Fuller-Austin's asbestos work there, and it includes a sworn statement explaining how you were exposed to asbestos on that site. Being at the site is what puts you where the fiber was; the statement is how we show the work put it in your air. What you don't need is a product or a brand name, so it doesn't matter that you can't remember whose insulation was on the pipe. What you can't skip is the site itself: there's no affidavit that substitutes for a covered site, so if your worksites and years can't be matched to the list, this particular trust may not be the right channel even when others are. The first thing we do on a Fuller-Austin claim is compare your work history against the trust's covered sites and years and build the account of how the work exposed you, which is exactly the kind of work this firm does.

You did not have to work for Fuller-Austin. Because eligibility runs on the job site, a worker who was never on Fuller-Austin's payroll, a refinery pipefitter, a plant laborer, an operator, can qualify on the strength of having worked at a covered site while Fuller-Austin's asbestos work was there or after it.

Families can file after a death. If a worker who was exposed at a Fuller-Austin site has passed away, the family can still bring the claim, as a wrongful-death or estate claim on the worker's exposure history. how asbestos trust claims work. If you're researching a household or take-home exposure, where a family member's own illness traces to dust brought home rather than to their own time at a site, call us; how that fits a site-based trust like this one is a question worth walking through directly.

How the trust documents your exposure

The proof centers on placing you at a covered site in the covered years. Employment and union records, Social Security earnings records, coworker accounts, and the documented history of where and when Fuller-Austin worked all go to that, alongside the medical records that establish the diagnosis and latency. For a worker who spent time at the refineries and plants where Fuller-Austin held insulation contracts, that match is often very much there to be made, even decades later. Putting it together, in the form the trust requires, is our job, not yours. You can also search our directory of asbestos exposure sites to see whether a site you worked is already documented.

How a Fuller-Austin 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 your diagnosis and latency, proof that you worked at a covered Fuller-Austin site in the covered years, and a sworn account of how the work exposed you there. Putting that together is our job. We gather the medical records, reconstruct the work history, and match it against the trust's site list, which for this trust is the heart of the work. You don't need to have kept paperwork or remember product names to start.

The Fuller-Austin trust has been paying claims since the late 1990s and is still accepting them, so the door is open. 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 Fuller-Austin claim is rarely the only one

For a contractor's trust, this isn't a footnote, it's the main event. The Fuller-Austin claim is almost always one of several, and the others come straight out of the same work.

Start with the insulation itself. Fuller-Austin didn't make it; it installed insulation that other companies manufactured, the pipe covering, block, and cement that came from the big insulation makers. Many of those manufacturers also went bankrupt and left their own asbestos trusts, and the very same exposure that supports your Fuller-Austin claim, breathing that insulation's dust, supports claims against the companies that made it. A contractor's claim points directly at the makers' trusts, and those values are typically far larger than the contractor's own.

Then there's the site. A refinery or a chemical plant was full of asbestos that had nothing to do with Fuller-Austin, from dozens of other contractors and product makers, which is why a refinery or insulation career usually reaches a whole set of trusts and defendants. And because each trust reviews and pays independently, the claims don't compete with one another. They add up. This matters all the more here, because the makers' trusts and the other defendants often use exposure rules that accept the kind of sworn-statement and coworker proof Fuller-Austin's site list doesn't, so the same career can reach compensation through them even where it's a tighter fit for Fuller-Austin itself. how asbestos trust claims work.

On its own, a Fuller-Austin mesothelioma claim is a meaningful but limited piece. Built alongside the insulation makers' trusts, the refinery and plant defendants, and the lawsuits and benefits that can run with them, it becomes 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 Fuller-Austin trust

A Fuller-Austin 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. Fuller-Austin is one, and as the section above explains, the insulation it installed and the sites it worked almost always reach a set of other trusts, usually the larger manufacturer trusts whose values dwarf a contractor's. They review and pay independently, so they stack. how asbestos trust claims work.
• Lawsuits against solvent manufacturers. Several makers of asbestos insulation and related products 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. This one is often substantial for Fuller-Austin's population. The refineries, petrochemical plants, and industrial sites where the work was done, many owned by major oil and chemical companies, can be held responsible for the asbestos conditions they allowed on their property, separate from the contractor and the product makers. how premises liability claims work.
• Federal and disability benefits. Depending on the work, these can include Social Security disability for anyone whose illness stops them from working, VA disability for those who also served in the military, and FECA benefits for civilian federal-facility work, all paid in addition to the trust and lawsuit recovery. how asbestos disability and benefit claims work.

Your Fuller-Austin 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. Fuller-Austin's asbestos liability was resolved 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 insulation makers still in business and the refinery and plant 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.