Formation of the California Residential Mitigation Program
Formed in August 2011, the California Residential Mitigation Program (CRMP) was established to help California homeowners strengthen their houses—with the help of seismic retrofit grants offered and other types of assistance and incentive programs—in order to create more resilient communities that are able to recover from the next damaging earthquake.
CRMP was created as a joint-powers-authority entity formed by its members, the California Earthquake Authority (CEA), a public instrumentality of the State of California, and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES). CRMP is a legally separate entity from its members.
Oversight is provided by the governing board, consisting of two members appointed by CEA and two members appointed by Cal OES. Program management is headed by CRMP’s executive director, with program and administrative support provided by CEA employees and contracted staff.
California Earthquake Authority
California Earthquake Authority (CEA) is a not-for-profit public instrumentality of the state of California that has two distinct roles: Since 1996, CEA has provided residential earthquake insurance while educating Californians about earthquake risk and helping them reduce their risk of earthquake losses through residential mitigation. Since 2019, CEA also has administered the Wildfire Fund, a catastrophe fund that provides a source of funding for payment of claims arising from a wildfire caused by any large electrical utility company that meets the legal requirements for participation in the fund.
CEA provides leadership to the CRMP Board, helped found CRMP in 2011, and continues to provide partial funding for CRMP's mitigation program, Earthquake Brace + Bolt.
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services
Cal OES is responsible for the coordination of overall state agency response to major disasters in support of local government. The office is responsible for assuring the state’s readiness to respond to and recover from all hazards – natural, man-made, war-caused emergencies and disasters – and for assisting local governments in their emergency preparedness, response, recovery, and hazard mitigation efforts. Cal OES provides leadership to the CRMP Board.
Our Retrofit Grant Programs
Earthquake Brace + Bolt
Our first retrofit grant program Earthquake Brace + Bolt: Funds To Strengthen Your Foundation, was launched in September 2013. Earthquake Brace + Bolt (EBB) was developed to help homeowners lessen the potential for earthquake damage to their house by offering incentive grants of up to $3,000 for a residential seismic retrofit. An EBB seismic retrofit involves bolting a house to its foundation and, when necessary, bracing the cripple walls with plywood, to help prevent the home from collapsing or sliding off its foundation. To date, EBB has helped thousands of homeowners seismically retrofit their house using EBB grants.
Earthquake Soft-Story
The second seismic retrofit grant program created by CRMP is the Earthquake Soft-Story (ESS) program. The ESS pilot program was launched in February 2023 in select Bay Area and Southern California cities. CRMP offers ESS grants of up to $13,000 to retrofit soft-story homes. Soft-story homes have one or more floors of living space built above a garage. These structures are vulnerable to damage because they may not be able to withstand the lateral movement from earthquake shaking. Houses with this condition may be prone to partial or full collapse during an earthquake.
CRMP is also currently developing a new earthquake retrofit grant program to support the retrofit of multifamily homes. The goal of the Seismic Retrofitting Program for Soft-Story Multifamily Housing is to support earthquake retrofitting of at-risk multifamily housing structures, which are older buildings with between two and 20 units with “tuck-under” parking or commercial space on the ground floor, beneath the living area.