Does Kodiak, AK need an earthquake retrofit?

Kodiak clears the point where the standard Seismic Design Category tables stop applying - USGS returns no letter here, only a flag that a site-specific study (ASCE 7-16 §11.4.8) is required. Treat that as more severe than any lettered category, not as missing data. Nationally, Kodiak ranks above 98% of the 4,875 cities in this dataset for seismic hazard - the 98th percentile.

How Kodiak compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.619g, short-period spectral response 1.5g, 1-second spectral response 0.882g. Among 11 Alaska cities in this dataset, Kodiak ranks 2 for seismic hazard, the 90th percentile within the state. About 5,399 people live in Kodiak, Alaska.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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

More on how this number was built

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