South Salt Lake's Seismic Design Category, explained

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

How South Salt Lake compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.707g, short-period spectral response 1.551g, 1-second spectral response 0.553g. Among 95 Utah cities in this dataset, South Salt Lake ranks 5 for seismic hazard, the 96th percentile within the state. About 26,561 people live in South Salt Lake, Utah.

Retrofit economics for South Salt Lake

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.

Earthquake insurance for a South Salt Lake home

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 South Salt Lake address.

More on how this number was built

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