Elizabethtown's Seismic Design Category, explained

Elizabethtown 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. Nationally, Elizabethtown ranks above 53% of the 4,875 cities in this dataset for seismic hazard - the 53th percentile.

How Elizabethtown compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.089g, short-period spectral response 0.163g, 1-second spectral response 0.045g. Among 193 Pennsylvania cities in this dataset, Elizabethtown ranks 61 for seismic hazard, the 69th percentile within the state. About 11,993 people live in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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

More on how this number was built

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