Does Hazelwood, MO need an earthquake retrofit?

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Hazelwood in Seismic Design Category D: 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. That puts Hazelwood in the 82th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 82% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

Where Hazelwood sits in Missouri

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.2g, short-period spectral response 0.366g, 1-second spectral response 0.143g. Among 135 Missouri cities in this dataset, Hazelwood ranks 54 for seismic hazard, the 60th percentile within the state. About 24,951 people live in Hazelwood, Missouri.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

Outside California, no state-level retrofit grant equivalent to Brace + Bolt could be found for Missouri. A typical retrofit still runs $5,000-$10,000 nationally, about $7,000 for a common single-family job.

Earthquake insurance for a Hazelwood 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 Hazelwood address.

More on how this number was built

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