The number of New Yorkers living in hurricane zones doubled in the last decade, and the city is launching an unprecedented emergency planning process to make sure its evacuation plan is ready by the time the next hurricane season hits.

The city will spend up to $200,000 on a “transportation analysis” for evacuating New Yorkers from the so-called slosh zones that would bear the brunt of major storm that hits the five boroughs.

The federal Army Corps of Engineers was initially supposed to conduct the analysis. It completed the first phases of the $1.1 million project early this fall – creating a map of hurricane zones and finding that the number of New Yorkers who live in the neighborhoods most at risk during hurricanes has jumped to between 2.2 million and 2.4 million from 1.1 million in 1993 and.

At a November meeting, the Army Corps of Engineers told the city’s Office of Emergency Management that the transportation portion of the study wouldn’t be completed until 2008. The delay prompted Senator Schumer to hold a press conference to voice his outrage, and pushed the city to action.

“We really need to get this done right away,” a spokesman for the Office of Emergency Management, Jarrod Bernstein, said. “We understand that hurricane preparedness is everyone’s responsibility. We have to spend some money on it.”

Last week the city issued a request for proposals, looking for a government agency or a private company to conduct the analysis.

The corps’ initial study, which was conducted before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, found that only 60% of New Yorkers who live in risky neighborhoods would voluntarily evacuate in advance of a storm. Mr. Bernstein said New York has decided to plan for evacuating 100% of people in the danger zones.

Already, the city has capacity for 800,000 people in public facilities like school gymnasiums, SUNY and CUNY facilities, and churches. The transportation analysis will factor in the evacuation of New Yorkers to city-run shelters as well as homes of friends and relatives. The planners also intend to study what the city calls the “worried well,” people who will evacuate even though their homes won’t be in direct danger. Plus, it will work backward to figure out when it must begin evacuating people before a storm strikes.

A project manager at the Army Corps of Engineers in New York, Steve Couch, said, “In the short term, New York City is picking up the slack to get the product that they need quickly,” but he added that eventually, once New York and the corps complete their portions of the project, the city will have a “better product” for the evacuation of the city.

Some emergency preparedness experts applauded the city’s effort.

“We cannot really count on the federal government being at the right place at the right time with sufficient resources either during the planning stage or during the response,” the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Irwin Redlener, said. “I think the city is doing the right thing, and I think the city will benefit.”

Other hurricane authorities said the city’s need to pay for the study speaks to a larger need for a coordinated and consistent federal program.

The director of the Hazards Research Lab at the University of South Carolina, Susan Cutter, said the federal government should mandate planning requirements and give local and state governments the option of exceeding those standards.

“The solution to this is to have a consistent policy at the federal level to facilitate these types of analyses at the state and local levels,” she said. “You want to make sure that everyone’s on the same page.”