Does Daphne, AL need an earthquake retrofit?

Daphne 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. That puts Daphne in the 25th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 25% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

Where Daphne sits in Alabama

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.044g, short-period spectral response 0.091g, 1-second spectral response 0.059g. Among 107 Alabama cities in this dataset, Daphne ranks 95 for seismic hazard, the 11th percentile within the state. About 30,751 people live in Daphne, Alabama.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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

More on how this number was built

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