Mounds View's Seismic Design Category, explained

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Mounds View in Seismic Design Category A: Lowest seismic design category. Building code requires no seismic-specific detailing here beyond ordinary construction practice. Rank it against the rest of the country and Mounds View sits at the 3th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

How Mounds View compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.022g, short-period spectral response 0.048g, 1-second spectral response 0.029g. Among 155 Minnesota cities in this dataset, Mounds View ranks 123 for seismic hazard, the 21th percentile within the state. About 12,841 people live in Mounds View, Minnesota.

What a retrofit costs in Mounds View

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

Earthquake insurance for a Mounds View 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 Mounds View address.

More on how this number was built

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