Dunellen's Seismic Design Category, explained

Dunellen 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 Dunellen in the 62th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 62% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

How Dunellen compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.159g, short-period spectral response 0.263g, 1-second spectral response 0.057g. Among 194 New Jersey cities in this dataset, Dunellen ranks 113 for seismic hazard, the 42th percentile within the state. About 8,411 people live in Dunellen, New Jersey.

What a retrofit costs in Dunellen

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

More on how this number was built

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