Salem's Seismic Design Category, explained

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Salem 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 Salem in the 96th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 96% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

Where Salem sits in Utah

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.708g, short-period spectral response 1.555g, 1-second spectral response 0.58g. Among 95 Utah cities in this dataset, Salem ranks 4 for seismic hazard, the 97th percentile within the state. About 11,283 people live in Salem, Utah.

What a retrofit costs in Salem

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

More on how this number was built

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