Ashland's Seismic Design Category, explained

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Ashland in Seismic Design Category A: Lowest seismic design category. Building code requires no seismic-specific detailing here beyond ordinary construction practice. That puts Ashland in the 1th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 1% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

Ashland by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.019g, short-period spectral response 0.041g, 1-second spectral response 0.016g. Among 157 Wisconsin cities in this dataset, Ashland ranks 157 for seismic hazard, the 0th percentile within the state. About 7,940 people live in Ashland, Wisconsin.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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

What this means for insurance

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 Ashland address.

More on how this number was built

The methodology guide covers exactly how USGS's public design-maps API produced Ashland'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.