Hillsboro's Seismic Design Category, explained

Hillsboro 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. That puts Hillsboro in the 88th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 88% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

Hillsboro by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.411g, short-period spectral response 0.892g, 1-second spectral response 0.423g. Among 80 Oregon cities in this dataset, Hillsboro ranks 23 for seismic hazard, the 72th percentile within the state. About 110,337 people live in Hillsboro, Oregon.

Retrofit economics for Hillsboro

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

Earthquake insurance for a Hillsboro 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 Hillsboro address.

More on how this number was built

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