Does St. Joseph, MO need an earthquake retrofit?

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

St. Joseph by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.041g, short-period spectral response 0.085g, 1-second spectral response 0.062g. Among 135 Missouri cities in this dataset, St. Joseph ranks 131 for seismic hazard, the 3th percentile within the state. About 71,098 people live in St. Joseph, Missouri.

Retrofit economics for St. Joseph

Outside California, no state-level retrofit grant equivalent to Brace + Bolt could be found for Missouri. A typical retrofit still runs $5,000-$10,000 nationally, about $7,000 for a common single-family job.

Earthquake insurance for a St. Joseph 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 St. Joseph address.

More on how this number was built

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