South St. Paul, MN: what USGS's seismic model says

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places South St. Paul in Seismic Design Category A: Lowest seismic design category. Building code requires no seismic-specific detailing here beyond ordinary construction practice. That puts South St. Paul in the 4th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 4% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

South St. Paul by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.022g, short-period spectral response 0.047g, 1-second spectral response 0.03g. Among 155 Minnesota cities in this dataset, South St. Paul ranks 115 for seismic hazard, the 26th percentile within the state. About 20,590 people live in South St. Paul, Minnesota.

Retrofit economics for South St. Paul

Outside California, no state-level retrofit grant equivalent to Brace + Bolt could be found for Minnesota. 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 South St. Paul address.

More on how this number was built

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