St. Augustine Beach's Seismic Design Category, explained

St. Augustine Beach 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 St. Augustine Beach in the 22th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 22% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

How St. Augustine Beach compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.042g, short-period spectral response 0.088g, 1-second spectral response 0.046g. Among 228 Florida cities in this dataset, St. Augustine Beach ranks 10 for seismic hazard, the 96th percentile within the state. About 6,808 people live in St. Augustine Beach, Florida.

What a retrofit costs in St. Augustine Beach

Outside California, no state-level retrofit grant equivalent to Brace + Bolt could be found for Florida. 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 St. Augustine Beach address.

More on how this number was built

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