Does Lexington, NC need an earthquake retrofit?

Lexington 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 Lexington in the 50th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 50% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

Where Lexington sits in North Carolina

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.079g, short-period spectral response 0.161g, 1-second spectral response 0.071g. Among 147 North Carolina cities in this dataset, Lexington ranks 74 for seismic hazard, the 50th percentile within the state. About 19,904 people live in Lexington, North Carolina.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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

More on how this number was built

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