Does Honolulu, HI need an earthquake retrofit?

Honolulu 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 Honolulu in the 84th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 84% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

Honolulu by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.267g, short-period spectral response 0.579g, 1-second spectral response 0.169g. About 344,967 people live in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Retrofit economics for Honolulu

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

Earthquake insurance for a Honolulu 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 Honolulu address.

More on how this number was built

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