Does Milliken, CO need an earthquake retrofit?

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Milliken in Seismic Design Category B: Low seismic hazard. Code requires basic seismic detailing (bracing, connections) but no special structural system restrictions. Rank it against the rest of the country and Milliken sits at the 52th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

Milliken by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.086g, short-period spectral response 0.166g, 1-second spectral response 0.052g. Among 79 Colorado cities in this dataset, Milliken ranks 70 for seismic hazard, the 12th percentile within the state. About 9,102 people live in Milliken, Colorado.

What a retrofit costs in Milliken

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

More on how this number was built

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