Does Thomasville, NC need an earthquake retrofit?

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Thomasville in Seismic Design Category B: Low seismic hazard. Code requires basic seismic detailing (bracing, connections) but no special structural system restrictions. Rank it against the rest of the country and Thomasville sits at the 48th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

How Thomasville compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.074g, short-period spectral response 0.152g, 1-second spectral response 0.069g. Among 147 North Carolina cities in this dataset, Thomasville ranks 81 for seismic hazard, the 45th percentile within the state. About 27,605 people live in Thomasville, North Carolina.

Retrofit economics for Thomasville

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.

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 Thomasville address.

More on how this number was built

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