Does River Falls, WI need an earthquake retrofit?

River Falls carries Seismic Design Category A under USGS's ASCE 7-16 model. Lowest seismic design category. Building code requires no seismic-specific detailing here beyond ordinary construction practice. Rank it against the rest of the country and River Falls sits at the 3th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

How River Falls compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.022g, short-period spectral response 0.046g, 1-second spectral response 0.031g. Among 157 Wisconsin cities in this dataset, River Falls ranks 141 for seismic hazard, the 10th percentile within the state. About 17,802 people live in River Falls, Wisconsin.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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.

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 River Falls address.

More on how this number was built

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