Aliquippa's Seismic Design Category, explained

Aliquippa carries Seismic Design Category B under USGS's ASCE 7-16 model. Low seismic hazard. Code requires basic seismic detailing (bracing, connections) but no special structural system restrictions. That puts Aliquippa in the 25th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 25% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

Aliquippa by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.044g, short-period spectral response 0.092g, 1-second spectral response 0.045g. Among 193 Pennsylvania cities in this dataset, Aliquippa ranks 120 for seismic hazard, the 38th percentile within the state. About 9,003 people live in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania.

What a retrofit costs in Aliquippa

Outside California, no state-level retrofit grant equivalent to Brace + Bolt could be found for Pennsylvania. A typical retrofit still runs $5,000-$10,000 nationally, about $7,000 for a common single-family job.

Insuring against this, not just retrofitting

Outside California, earthquake coverage is typically sold as an endorsement added to a standard homeowners policy, not a separate product - worth asking about directly when getting a home-insurance quote for a Aliquippa address.

More on how this number was built

The methodology guide covers exactly how USGS's public design-maps API produced Aliquippa's numbers. The guide to what a Seismic Design Category actually means covers why a category is never a substitute for an engineer's assessment of one specific house.