Cedarburg's Seismic Design Category, explained

Cedarburg 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. Rank it against the rest of the country and Cedarburg sits at the 17th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

How Cedarburg compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.033g, short-period spectral response 0.069g, 1-second spectral response 0.045g. Among 157 Wisconsin cities in this dataset, Cedarburg ranks 82 for seismic hazard, the 48th percentile within the state. About 13,011 people live in Cedarburg, Wisconsin.

Retrofit economics for Cedarburg

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

More on how this number was built

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