Moses Lake's Seismic Design Category, explained

Moses Lake 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, Moses Lake ranks above 81% of the 4,875 cities in this dataset for seismic hazard - the 81th percentile.

Moses Lake by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.174g, short-period spectral response 0.389g, 1-second spectral response 0.152g. Among 125 Washington cities in this dataset, Moses Lake ranks 113 for seismic hazard, the 10th percentile within the state. About 26,969 people live in Moses Lake, Washington.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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

More on how this number was built

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