Does Oswego, NY need an earthquake retrofit?

Oswego carries Seismic Design Category B under USGS's ASCE 7-16 model. Low seismic hazard. Code requires basic seismic detailing (bracing, connections) but no special structural system restrictions. That puts Oswego in the 47th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 47% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

Oswego by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.073g, short-period spectral response 0.147g, 1-second spectral response 0.052g. Among 170 New York cities in this dataset, Oswego ranks 145 for seismic hazard, the 15th percentile within the state. About 17,047 people live in Oswego, New York.

Retrofit economics for Oswego

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

More on how this number was built

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