Holmen's Seismic Design Category, explained

Holmen carries Seismic Design Category A under USGS's ASCE 7-16 model. Lowest seismic design category. Building code requires no seismic-specific detailing here beyond ordinary construction practice. That puts Holmen in the 6th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 6% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

Holmen by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.024g, short-period spectral response 0.05g, 1-second spectral response 0.038g. Among 157 Wisconsin cities in this dataset, Holmen ranks 133 for seismic hazard, the 15th percentile within the state. About 11,866 people live in Holmen, Wisconsin.

What a retrofit costs in Holmen

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

More on how this number was built

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