Wildwood's Seismic Design Category, explained

Wildwood carries Seismic Design Category A under USGS's ASCE 7-16 model. Lowest seismic design category. Building code requires no seismic-specific detailing here beyond ordinary construction practice. Rank it against the rest of the country and Wildwood sits at the 11th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

Wildwood by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.03g, short-period spectral response 0.064g, 1-second spectral response 0.034g. Among 228 Florida cities in this dataset, Wildwood ranks 70 for seismic hazard, the 70th percentile within the state. About 19,031 people live in Wildwood, Florida.

Retrofit economics for Wildwood

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

More on how this number was built

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