Does St. James, NC need an earthquake retrofit?

St. James 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. James in the 54th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 54% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

Where St. James sits in North Carolina

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.092g, short-period spectral response 0.18g, 1-second spectral response 0.076g. Among 147 North Carolina cities in this dataset, St. James ranks 58 for seismic hazard, the 61th percentile within the state. About 7,315 people live in St. James, North Carolina.

What a retrofit costs in St. James

Outside California, no state-level retrofit grant equivalent to Brace + Bolt could be found for North Carolina. 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 St. James address.

More on how this number was built

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