Brenham's Seismic Design Category, explained

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Brenham in Seismic Design Category A: Lowest seismic design category. Building code requires no seismic-specific detailing here beyond ordinary construction practice. Rank it against the rest of the country and Brenham sits at the 11th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

How Brenham compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.031g, short-period spectral response 0.064g, 1-second spectral response 0.038g. Among 384 Texas cities in this dataset, Brenham ranks 257 for seismic hazard, the 33th percentile within the state. About 19,728 people live in Brenham, Texas.

Retrofit economics for Brenham

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

More on how this number was built

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