Does Fort Dodge, IA need an earthquake retrofit?

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Fort Dodge in Seismic Design Category B: Low seismic hazard. Code requires basic seismic detailing (bracing, connections) but no special structural system restrictions. Rank it against the rest of the country and Fort Dodge sits at the 16th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

Fort Dodge by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.026g, short-period spectral response 0.055g, 1-second spectral response 0.043g. Among 85 Iowa cities in this dataset, Fort Dodge ranks 68 for seismic hazard, the 20th percentile within the state. About 24,886 people live in Fort Dodge, Iowa.

What a retrofit costs in Fort Dodge

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

More on how this number was built

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