Sweetwater, TX: what USGS's seismic model says

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Sweetwater in Seismic Design Category A: Lowest seismic design category. Building code requires no seismic-specific detailing here beyond ordinary construction practice. Rank it against the rest of the country and Sweetwater sits at the 11th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

How Sweetwater compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.031g, short-period spectral response 0.067g, 1-second spectral response 0.033g. Among 384 Texas cities in this dataset, Sweetwater ranks 262 for seismic hazard, the 32th percentile within the state. About 10,196 people live in Sweetwater, Texas.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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

Earthquake insurance for a Sweetwater 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 Sweetwater address.

More on how this number was built

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