Pocahontas's Seismic Design Category, explained

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Pocahontas in Seismic Design 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. That puts Pocahontas in the 88th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 88% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

Pocahontas by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.434g, short-period spectral response 0.753g, 1-second spectral response 0.265g. Among 68 Arkansas cities in this dataset, Pocahontas ranks 11 for seismic hazard, the 85th percentile within the state. About 7,703 people live in Pocahontas, Arkansas.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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

More on how this number was built

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