Does Prairie Village, KS need an earthquake retrofit?

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Prairie Village 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 Prairie Village sits at the 26th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

Where Prairie Village sits in Kansas

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.045g, short-period spectral response 0.096g, 1-second spectral response 0.069g. Among 63 Kansas cities in this dataset, Prairie Village ranks 21 for seismic hazard, the 68th percentile within the state. About 22,919 people live in Prairie Village, Kansas.

Retrofit economics for Prairie Village

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

More on how this number was built

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