Does Neenah, WI need an earthquake retrofit?

Neenah carries Seismic Design Category A under USGS's ASCE 7-16 model. Lowest seismic design category. Building code requires no seismic-specific detailing here beyond ordinary construction practice. That puts Neenah in the 9th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 9% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

How Neenah compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.026g, short-period spectral response 0.054g, 1-second spectral response 0.038g. Among 157 Wisconsin cities in this dataset, Neenah ranks 106 for seismic hazard, the 33th percentile within the state. About 27,502 people live in Neenah, Wisconsin.

Retrofit economics for Neenah

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

More on how this number was built

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