Does Church Hill, TN need an earthquake retrofit?

Church Hill carries Seismic Design Category C under USGS's ASCE 7-16 model. Moderate seismic hazard. Code adds irregular-building restrictions and requires bracing of some nonstructural components (e.g. tall shelving, water heaters) in addition to structural detailing. Rank it against the rest of the country and Church Hill sits at the 77th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

Church Hill by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.191g, short-period spectral response 0.319g, 1-second spectral response 0.094g. Among 104 Tennessee cities in this dataset, Church Hill ranks 83 for seismic hazard, the 20th percentile within the state. About 7,310 people live in Church Hill, 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.

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 Church Hill address.

More on how this number was built

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