North Salt Lake's Seismic Design Category, explained

Under the seismic model IBC and ASCE 7 use for new construction, North Salt Lake is Category D. 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. Rank it against the rest of the country and North Salt Lake sits at the 96th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

How North Salt Lake compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.727g, short-period spectral response 1.596g, 1-second spectral response 0.588g. Among 95 Utah cities in this dataset, North Salt Lake ranks 3 for seismic hazard, the 98th percentile within the state. About 23,593 people live in North Salt Lake, Utah.

Retrofit economics for North Salt Lake

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

More on how this number was built

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