Does Greenville, TX need an earthquake retrofit?

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Greenville 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 Greenville sits at the 34th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

How Greenville compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.056g, short-period spectral response 0.115g, 1-second spectral response 0.061g. Among 384 Texas cities in this dataset, Greenville ranks 51 for seismic hazard, the 87th percentile within the state. About 34,355 people live in Greenville, Texas.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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

More on how this number was built

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