Pleasant Garden's Seismic Design Category, explained

Under the seismic model IBC and ASCE 7 use for new construction, Pleasant Garden is Category B. Low seismic hazard. Code requires basic seismic detailing (bracing, connections) but no special structural system restrictions. That puts Pleasant Garden in the 43th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 43% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

How Pleasant Garden compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.068g, short-period spectral response 0.14g, 1-second spectral response 0.066g. Among 147 North Carolina cities in this dataset, Pleasant Garden ranks 94 for seismic hazard, the 36th percentile within the state. About 5,151 people live in Pleasant Garden, North Carolina.

Retrofit economics for Pleasant Garden

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

Earthquake insurance for a Pleasant Garden 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 Pleasant Garden address.

More on how this number was built

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