Does Pleasant Prairie, WI need an earthquake retrofit?

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Pleasant Prairie in Seismic Design Category B: Low seismic hazard. Code requires basic seismic detailing (bracing, connections) but no special structural system restrictions. Rank it against the rest of the country and Pleasant Prairie sits at the 26th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

How Pleasant Prairie compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.045g, short-period spectral response 0.092g, 1-second spectral response 0.054g. Among 157 Wisconsin cities in this dataset, Pleasant Prairie ranks 7 for seismic hazard, the 96th percentile within the state. About 21,802 people live in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin.

Retrofit economics for Pleasant Prairie

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.

What this means for insurance

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 Prairie address.

More on how this number was built

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