Does Madras, OR need an earthquake retrofit?

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Madras in Seismic Design Category D: 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 Madras in the 81th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 81% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

How Madras compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.174g, short-period spectral response 0.384g, 1-second spectral response 0.191g. Among 80 Oregon cities in this dataset, Madras ranks 70 for seismic hazard, the 13th percentile within the state. About 7,764 people live in Madras, Oregon.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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

Earthquake insurance for a Madras 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 Madras address.

More on how this number was built

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