Does Town of Pecos, TX need an earthquake retrofit?

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Town of Pecos in Seismic Design Category B: Low seismic hazard. Code requires basic seismic detailing (bracing, connections) but no special structural system restrictions. That puts Town of Pecos in the 46th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 46% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

Town of Pecos by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.072g, short-period spectral response 0.145g, 1-second spectral response 0.047g. Among 384 Texas cities in this dataset, Town of Pecos ranks 22 for seismic hazard, the 95th percentile within the state. About 10,224 people live in Town of Pecos, Texas.

What a retrofit costs in Town of Pecos

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.

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 Town of Pecos address.

More on how this number was built

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