Westerville's Seismic Design Category, explained

Westerville carries Seismic Design Category B under USGS's ASCE 7-16 model. 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 Westerville sits at the 36th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

Westerville by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.058g, short-period spectral response 0.116g, 1-second spectral response 0.058g. Among 254 Ohio cities in this dataset, Westerville ranks 209 for seismic hazard, the 18th percentile within the state. About 38,612 people live in Westerville, Ohio.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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

More on how this number was built

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