Bath's Seismic Design Category, explained

Bath 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. Rank it against the rest of the country and Bath sits at the 63th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

How Bath compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.168g, short-period spectral response 0.283g, 1-second spectral response 0.072g. Among 20 Maine cities in this dataset, Bath ranks 16 for seismic hazard, the 21th percentile within the state. About 8,817 people live in Bath, Maine.

What a retrofit costs in Bath

Outside California, no state-level retrofit grant equivalent to Brace + Bolt could be found for Maine. 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 Bath address.

More on how this number was built

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