Brownsville's Seismic Design Category, explained

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Brownsville in Seismic Design Category D: High seismic hazard - this is the category most of coastal California, the Pacific Northwest, and other active fault regions fall into. Code mandates significant seismic detailing and restricts irregular structural configurations. This is the category the Brace + Bolt scope (cripple-wall bracing, foundation bolting) is built for. Nationally, Brownsville ranks above 91% of the 4,875 cities in this dataset for seismic hazard - the 91th percentile.

Where Brownsville sits in Tennessee

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.539g, short-period spectral response 0.922g, 1-second spectral response 0.324g. Among 104 Tennessee cities in this dataset, Brownsville ranks 11 for seismic hazard, the 90th percentile within the state. About 9,358 people live in Brownsville, Tennessee.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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

Earthquake insurance for a Brownsville home

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 Brownsville address.

More on how this number was built

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