College Place's Seismic Design Category, explained

Under the seismic model IBC and ASCE 7 use for new construction, College Place 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. Nationally, College Place ranks above 81% of the 4,875 cities in this dataset for seismic hazard - the 81th percentile.

Where College Place sits in Washington

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.183g, short-period spectral response 0.406g, 1-second spectral response 0.14g. Among 125 Washington cities in this dataset, College Place ranks 108 for seismic hazard, the 14th percentile within the state. About 9,846 people live in College Place, Washington.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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 College Place address.

More on how this number was built

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