Does Holyoke, MA need an earthquake retrofit?

Holyoke carries Seismic Design Category B under USGS's ASCE 7-16 model. Low seismic hazard. Code requires basic seismic detailing (bracing, connections) but no special structural system restrictions. That puts Holyoke in the 52th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 52% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

How Holyoke compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.085g, short-period spectral response 0.166g, 1-second spectral response 0.055g. Among 58 Massachusetts cities in this dataset, Holyoke ranks 56 for seismic hazard, the 4th percentile within the state. About 37,838 people live in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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

What this means for insurance

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 Holyoke address.

More on how this number was built

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