Bridgewater Town's Seismic Design Category, explained

Bridgewater Town 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. Nationally, Bridgewater Town ranks above 59% of the 4,875 cities in this dataset for seismic hazard - the 59th percentile.

How Bridgewater Town compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.117g, short-period spectral response 0.21g, 1-second spectral response 0.057g. Among 58 Massachusetts cities in this dataset, Bridgewater Town ranks 38 for seismic hazard, the 35th percentile within the state. About 29,167 people live in Bridgewater Town, Massachusetts.

What a retrofit costs in Bridgewater Town

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

More on how this number was built

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