Tomah's Seismic Design Category, explained

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Tomah 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 Tomah sits at the 8th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

Where Tomah sits in Wisconsin

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.025g, short-period spectral response 0.052g, 1-second spectral response 0.039g. Among 157 Wisconsin cities in this dataset, Tomah ranks 118 for seismic hazard, the 25th percentile within the state. About 9,574 people live in Tomah, Wisconsin.

What a retrofit costs in Tomah

Outside California, no state-level retrofit grant equivalent to Brace + Bolt could be found for Wisconsin. 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 Tomah address.

More on how this number was built

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