Does Milan, TN need an earthquake retrofit?

Milan carries Seismic Design Category D under USGS's ASCE 7-16 model. 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. Nationally, Milan ranks above 90% of the 4,875 cities in this dataset for seismic hazard - the 90th percentile.

Milan by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.5g, short-period spectral response 0.879g, 1-second spectral response 0.312g. Among 104 Tennessee cities in this dataset, Milan ranks 16 for seismic hazard, the 85th percentile within the state. About 8,306 people live in Milan, Tennessee.

What a retrofit costs in Milan

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

What this means for insurance

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 Milan address.

More on how this number was built

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