Franklin's Seismic Design Category, explained

Franklin carries Seismic Design Category D under USGS's ASCE 7-16 model. High seismic hazard - this is the category most of coastal California, the Pacific Northwest, and other active fault regions fall into. Code mandates significant seismic detailing and restricts irregular structural configurations. This is the category the Brace + Bolt scope (cripple-wall bracing, foundation bolting) is built for. Nationally, Franklin ranks above 79% of the 4,875 cities in this dataset for seismic hazard - the 79th percentile.

How Franklin compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.126g, short-period spectral response 0.259g, 1-second spectral response 0.134g. Among 79 Kentucky cities in this dataset, Franklin ranks 12 for seismic hazard, the 86th percentile within the state. About 10,524 people live in Franklin, Kentucky.

What a retrofit costs in Franklin

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

More on how this number was built

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