Does Red Lion, PA need an earthquake retrofit?

Red Lion 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 Red Lion in the 54th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 54% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

Red Lion by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.094g, short-period spectral response 0.17g, 1-second spectral response 0.046g. Among 193 Pennsylvania cities in this dataset, Red Lion ranks 57 for seismic hazard, the 71th percentile within the state. About 6,552 people live in Red Lion, Pennsylvania.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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

More on how this number was built

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