Does Delray Beach, FL need an earthquake retrofit?

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Delray Beach in Seismic Design Category A: Lowest seismic design category. Building code requires no seismic-specific detailing here beyond ordinary construction practice. That puts Delray Beach in the 2th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 2% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

How Delray Beach compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.021g, short-period spectral response 0.044g, 1-second spectral response 0.023g. Among 228 Florida cities in this dataset, Delray Beach ranks 162 for seismic hazard, the 29th percentile within the state. About 70,140 people live in Delray Beach, Florida.

Retrofit economics for Delray Beach

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

More on how this number was built

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