Burien's Seismic Design Category, explained

Under the seismic model IBC and ASCE 7 use for new construction, Burien is 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. Rank it against the rest of the country and Burien sits at the 95th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

How Burien compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.66g, short-period spectral response 1.547g, 1-second spectral response 0.527g. Among 125 Washington cities in this dataset, Burien ranks 8 for seismic hazard, the 94th percentile within the state. About 52,046 people live in Burien, Washington.

What a retrofit costs in Burien

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

More on how this number was built

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