Hopewell's Seismic Design Category, explained

Hopewell 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 Hopewell in the 54th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 54% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

Where Hopewell sits in Virginia

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.094g, short-period spectral response 0.169g, 1-second spectral response 0.049g. Among 63 Virginia cities in this dataset, Hopewell ranks 23 for seismic hazard, the 65th percentile within the state. About 22,970 people live in Hopewell, Virginia.

What a retrofit costs in Hopewell

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

More on how this number was built

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