Washingtonville's Seismic Design Category, explained

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Washingtonville 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 Washingtonville sits at the 61th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

Washingtonville by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.14g, short-period spectral response 0.239g, 1-second spectral response 0.057g. Among 170 New York cities in this dataset, Washingtonville ranks 76 for seismic hazard, the 56th percentile within the state. About 5,650 people live in Washingtonville, New York.

What a retrofit costs in Washingtonville

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

More on how this number was built

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