Ellwood City, PA: what USGS's seismic model says

Ellwood City 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 Ellwood City in the 27th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 27% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

How Ellwood City compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.047g, short-period spectral response 0.096g, 1-second spectral response 0.045g. Among 193 Pennsylvania cities in this dataset, Ellwood City ranks 114 for seismic hazard, the 41th percentile within the state. About 7,416 people live in Ellwood City, 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.

Earthquake insurance for a Ellwood City home

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 Ellwood City address.

More on how this number was built

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