Lottery opens for homeowners to retrofit their homes for earthquake safety
San Francisco, partially enshrouded by coastal fog and the Oakland Bay Bridge, Berkeley, and north San Francisco Bay, California. (Photo by: Marli Miller/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
OAKLAND, Calif. - Homeowners worried about the next big earthquake might be able to get up to $3,000 to help prepare their homes for the big one.
California's Earthquake Brace + Bolt program has opened its annual lottery for qualifying residents who need support to retrofit their homes. Accepted applicants will be reimbursed up to $3,000, or $7,000 for low-income households, toward the cost of retrofitting their home to make it earthquake safe.
The program is open to wood-framed homes with crawlspaces that were built before 1980, and subsidizes the cost of three critical upgrades that can reduce earthquake damage:
- bolting the foundation to the frame of the house
- adding plywood braces to the cripple walls in the crawl space
- strapping the water heater into place
The program is restricted to a pre-determined list of ZIP codes, the full list of which can be found here.
Earthquake Brace + Bolt was created in 2013, and has assisted more than 26,000 California homeowners since its inception. This marks the first time the program is open for property owners to apply for assistance for a home that is not their primary residence.
The cost of damage
By the numbers:
Earthquake damage isn't typically covered by homeowner's insurance, and buying a separate policy for earthquake insurance can add to already spiking insurance costs.
As reported by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, only 10% of California homeowners have earthquake coverage, despite the fact that California experiences 90% of the nation's earthquakes.
The Bay Area has multiple major earthquake faults, with the Hayward fault being named the most dangerous by the University of California Berkeley Seismology Lab. That fault has a 32% chance of producing a 6.7 magnitude earthquake, or greater, by 2036.
Berkeley Seismology Lab determined the Bay Area as a whole has a 63% chance of experiencing a magnitude 6.7 earthquake in the same time period.
The Earthquake Brace + Bolt program is run by the California Residential Mitigation Program. Applications are open through Oct. 1, and applicants who don't win the lottery are placed on a wait list. The program requires homeowners seeking the subsidy to wait to obtain a building permit until they've been accepted into the program.