Does Painesville, OH need an earthquake retrofit?

Painesville 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 Painesville in the 53th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 53% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

How Painesville compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.088g, short-period spectral response 0.16g, 1-second spectral response 0.049g. Among 254 Ohio cities in this dataset, Painesville ranks 17 for seismic hazard, the 94th percentile within the state. About 20,660 people live in Painesville, Ohio.

What a retrofit costs in Painesville

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

More on how this number was built

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