Does West Haven, UT need an earthquake retrofit?

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places West Haven in Seismic Design Category D: High seismic hazard - this is the category most of coastal California, the Pacific Northwest, and other active fault regions fall into. Code mandates significant seismic detailing and restricts irregular structural configurations. This is the category the Brace + Bolt scope (cripple-wall bracing, foundation bolting) is built for. Rank it against the rest of the country and West Haven sits at the 91th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

Where West Haven sits in Utah

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.543g, short-period spectral response 1.227g, 1-second spectral response 0.433g. Among 95 Utah cities in this dataset, West Haven ranks 54 for seismic hazard, the 44th percentile within the state. About 24,617 people live in West Haven, Utah.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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

More on how this number was built

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