THIS WEEK
Earthquake resilience
Resilience industry updates
Seasonal checklist
Resilience first dreamhouse
THIS WEEK
Earthquake Readiness
The recent earthquakes in Colombia are a reminder that seismic risk doesn't schedule itself. And here's the part that surprises most U.S. homeowners: the hazard map isn't just the West Coast. The New Madrid seismic zone (Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky), the Wasatch Front in Utah, the Charleston, South Carolina area, and the Cascadia subduction zone off Oregon and Washington all carry serious risk — and unlike California, most homes in those regions were built with no seismic detailing at all. Like everything else in this newsletter, this is a systems problem: structure, gas, and water all fail together in a quake, and the fixes are cheaper than you'd guess if you do them in the right order.
When it comes to seismic retrofits, there’s unfortunately not much we can do on our own. But we can start with the little things:
The free tier: securing contents. $0–$300. Strap the water heater (often legally required already), anchor tall furniture and the TV, use museum putty on shelf items, move heavy objects off high shelves over beds. Most quake injuries are falling objects, not falling buildings.
Automatic gas shutoff valve. $250–$750 installed. Closes on strong shaking. Some utilities install or subsidize them; some jurisdictions require them at sale or remodel. Check with your gas utility before paying retail.
Brace + bolt retrofit. $3,000–$7,500 for a typical one-story wood-frame home with a crawlspace. Bolts the sill plate, braces the cripple walls. This is the highest-leverage structural dollar in the whole ladder.
Soft-story or hillside retrofit. $10,000–$80,000+, engineering required. For living-over-garage homes, homes on steep slopes, or post-and-pier foundations. Custom work, real engineer, real permit.
Chimney mitigation and full structural upgrade. Varies widely. Removing or bracing a URM chimney, adding shear walls, upgrading connections roof-to-foundation. Usually bundled into a larger remodel where the walls are already open.
The step everyone skips
Finding out what you actually have. Before pricing anything, answer three questions: When was the house built relative to your state's first seismic code (in most of the country: there isn't one)? Is the sill plate bolted — go look in the crawlspace, bolt heads every 4–6 feet along the mudsill? Do you have cripple walls, and are they sheathed in plywood or just siding?
That twenty-minute crawlspace inspection is the seismic equivalent of the load calculation from our backup power issue: the number everyone guesses at instead of measuring. A 1990s house in Memphis and a 1920s house in Memphis are entirely different risks, and neither one knows it.
Permits and code
Brace + bolt retrofits in most jurisdictions can be done under a prescriptive standard — commonly FEMA P-1100 or the older "Plan Set A" — which means a standard permit without custom engineering, if your house fits the profile (one or two stories, wood frame, crawlspace under 4 feet). Soft-story and hillside work always needs an engineer. Gas shutoff valves must be installed by a licensed plumber or the utility, and the utility must be notified because they'll need to relight and inspect after any activation. DIY structural work without a permit can complicate both insurance claims and resale disclosure.
Maintenance, by system
Retrofit hardware: essentially maintenance-free once installed, but recheck after any significant quake — bolts can elongate holes, plywood can crack. A retrofit is a crumple zone; it's allowed to be sacrificial.
Gas shutoff valve: know where it is and how to reset it. After it trips, every pilot light in the house needs relighting; the utility will do this.
Water heater straps: check tension annually and any time the heater is replaced — the new unit doesn't inherit the old unit's straps being reinstalled correctly.
Emergency supplies: water (1 gallon per person per day, 3+ days), and know your manual gas shutoff wrench location even with an automatic valve.
Stand at your foundation line outside and find the anchor bolts — or don't. If you can see the wood sill sitting on concrete with no bolt heads, washers, or foundation plates anywhere along it, your house is attached to its foundation by weight alone.
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Resilience Industry Updates
You can add a heat pump without ripping out your old furnace. The revised federal approach lets homeowners retain an existing heating system as backup, which amounts to a green light for a phased, dual-fuel resilience strategy. resilience strategy.
Oklahoma reopened one of the country's more tangible hardening incentives. The Strengthen Oklahoma Homes grants reopened July 13: up to $10,000 for an IBHS FORTIFIED Roof High Wind and Hail designation, which can also translate into lower insurance premiums.
Florida is refunding sales tax on storm-hardened openings. The new program started July 1: qualifying impact-resistant doors, garage doors, and windows on homesteaded properties can get back up to $500 in refunded sales tax through June 2028.
New York keeps investing in resilience infrastructure, though not directly in your wallet yet. The state's Office of Resilient Homes and Communities issued a July 8 addendum to its infrastructure program; more a signal of continued state commitment than a homeowner rebate, but worth tracking.
Green building is being scored as a system, not a carbon checklist. Enterprise Green Communities' 2026 criteria now link healthy, energy-efficient, climate-resilient affordable housing with WELL Residential certification.
Indoor air quality is becoming something buildings actually respond to, not just filter for. ARPA-H reported progress on BREATHE, its healthy-buildings initiative for sensing and responding to airborne biological threats in real time.
The U.S. still has no national indoor air quality standard. Brown University's Clean Indoor Air Initiative connected poor IAQ to respiratory disease and cognitive effects, reinforcing why source control, ventilation, and moisture management belong in every renovation, not just the ambitious ones.
Insurance may become the most persuasive argument for hazard-resistant upgrades. Arizona State University is researching how insurance incentives, subsidies, and tax credits could actually get homeowners to build and retrofit for resilience.
The biggest remodeling markets are also the biggest risk markets. California, Texas, and Florida account for more than 20% of U.S. remodeling activity, according to NAHB, and not coincidentally, they're also among the highest-exposure states for heat, drought, hurricane, and wildfire.
California's Earthquake Brace + Bolt (EBB) program has offered grants of $3,000 toward qualifying retrofits, with supplemental grants for lower-income households — registration windows open periodically and fill fast. Outside California, check your state emergency management agency: FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Assistance grants flow through states and occasionally reach residential seismic work, especially in the New Madrid and Wasatch regions. Earthquake insurance is a separate policy everywhere (standard homeowners excludes it), and here's the systems payoff: a documented retrofit typically cuts the premium and, more importantly, the deductible math — CEA policies in California offer meaningful retrofit discounts. Retrofit first, then shop insurance, in that order.
OUR TAKE
Never turn gas back on yourself after a quake-triggered shutoff. That's the utility's job, and the reason is every pilot light in the house.
If you smell gas after shaking: out first, shut off at the meter if you can do it on the way, call from outside. No switches, no phones indoors, no "just checking." Unreinforced masonry chimneys drop bricks through roofs and onto exits. If yours is URM and unbraced, don't put beds or the main exit path under its fall line while you decide what to do about it.
KEY TERMS
Cripple wall — The short wood-framed wall between the foundation and the first floor in many older homes. The single most common seismic failure point: it folds sideways and the house drops off its foundation.
Sill plate (mudsill) — The wood member that sits directly on the concrete foundation. In pre-code homes it's often just resting there, held by gravity and habit.
Bolting — Anchoring the sill plate to the foundation with anchor bolts or foundation plates so the house can't slide off.
Bracing — Sheathing cripple walls with structural plywood so they can't rack and collapse. Bolting and bracing together are the core of a standard retrofit.
Brace + bolt retrofit — The standardized, prescriptive retrofit (bolt the sill, brace the cripple walls) that covers most one- and two-story wood-frame homes without needing custom engineering.
Soft story — A ground floor that's mostly openings — think living space over a garage. The garage-door wall has almost no shear strength and is a classic collapse mechanism.
Automatic gas shutoff valve — A valve at the meter that closes when it senses strong shaking, cutting gas before a broken line meets an ignition source. Fire after the quake is historically the bigger killer than the quake itself.
Seismic gas appliance strapping — Steel straps anchoring the water heater (and sometimes furnace) to wall studs. A toppled water heater means a sheared gas line and a flooded floor in one move.
Peak ground acceleration (PGA) — How hard the ground actually shakes at your site, which is what damages houses. Magnitude is the earthquake; PGA is your address's experience of it.
Unreinforced masonry (URM) — Brick or block construction with no steel reinforcement. Chimneys are the most common URM element on wood-frame houses, and they come down first.
We automatically receive alerts for earthquakes 5.0 or higher magnitude. Thanks to ShakeAlert.
Resilience First Dreamhouse
Practice Ground by Trias
Practice Ground by Trias
Practice Ground by Trias