Does Horseheads, NY need an earthquake retrofit?

Horseheads 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 Horseheads in the 33th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 33% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

How Horseheads compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.055g, short-period spectral response 0.113g, 1-second spectral response 0.043g. Among 170 New York cities in this dataset, Horseheads ranks 163 for seismic hazard, the 4th percentile within the state. About 6,343 people live in Horseheads, New York.

Retrofit economics for Horseheads

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

More on how this number was built

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