West Point's Seismic Design Category, explained

West Point carries Seismic Design Category D under USGS's ASCE 7-16 model. 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. Nationally, West Point ranks above 88% of the 4,875 cities in this dataset for seismic hazard - the 88th percentile.

Where West Point sits in Utah

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.429g, short-period spectral response 0.986g, 1-second spectral response 0.351g. Among 95 Utah cities in this dataset, West Point ranks 71 for seismic hazard, the 26th percentile within the state. About 12,726 people live in West Point, 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 Point address.

More on how this number was built

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