Blytheville's Seismic Design Category, explained

Blytheville clears the point where the standard Seismic Design Category tables stop applying - USGS returns no letter here, only a flag that a site-specific study (ASCE 7-16 §11.4.8) is required. Treat that as more severe than any lettered category, not as missing data. Rank it against the rest of the country and Blytheville sits at the 100th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

How Blytheville compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 1.642g, short-period spectral response 2.557g, 1-second spectral response 0.941g. Among 68 Arkansas cities in this dataset, Blytheville ranks 1 for seismic hazard, the 100th percentile within the state. About 12,359 people live in Blytheville, Arkansas.

What a retrofit costs in Blytheville

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

More on how this number was built

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