Weymouth Town, MA: what USGS's seismic model says

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

How Weymouth Town compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.136g, short-period spectral response 0.236g, 1-second spectral response 0.061g. Among 58 Massachusetts cities in this dataset, Weymouth Town ranks 32 for seismic hazard, the 46th percentile within the state. About 60,159 people live in Weymouth Town, Massachusetts.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

Outside California, no state-level retrofit grant equivalent to Brace + Bolt could be found for Massachusetts. A typical retrofit still runs $5,000-$10,000 nationally, about $7,000 for a common single-family job.

Insuring against this, not just retrofitting

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 Weymouth Town address.

More on how this number was built

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