Project Impact was a program that had an emphasis on disaster mitigation. The City of Seattle made seismic home retrofits a priority project of their work in the area of mitigation. See their handbook that helps owners of older homes to do an assessment of their property and what will be needed to protect their investment, CITY OF SEATTLE EARTHQUAKE HOME RETROFIT HANDBOOK.
The $30K estimate in the BC story seems a bit high to me. Back in the day (20 years ago) a homeowner could do the job for a few grand and to have a contractor do the work for the "average" home was estimated at $5K.
Steve Myers shared the BC story link above.
