Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday that if a monster hurricane similar to Katrina threatens New York, he would sign an executive order forcing residents in flood-prone areas to evacuate.

“In this case, we would have the legal right to go and to make sure that people left those zones where we felt there was imminent danger to their lives,” Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday as he presented the city’s storm evacuation plan. “We’re not going to sit there and let people die.”

The $30 million plan prepares for a worst-case evacuation for up to 3 million people and shelter for 600,000. It also addresses the evacuation of hospitals, nursing homes, and the homebound.

Mr. Bloomberg said the city must be “self-sufficient” and not rely on the federal government, which many criticized for failing to adequately respond to Katrina in New Orleans. He also stressed that a Category 4 storm has never swept through this area. Meteorologists say the Northeast is overdue for a major hurricane and could face one as early as this summer.

The city’s new plan relies largely on a two-stop system comprising 65 evacuation centers that would then dispatch evacuees to more than 500 shelters. The number of evacuation centers has tripled since the city first started its revision of the system.

Some have charged that a two-stop model will only waste time, but city officials argue that it is more efficient because the number of shelters needed would depend on the severity of the storm and the magnitude of the evacuation.

Details of the plan are being sent to 300,000 homes in vulnerable areas like the Rockaway and parts of Brooklyn and Staten Island. The city is planning to present it throughout the hurricane season.

The plan calls on the 21 hospitals and dozens of nursing homes in the “surge zone” to evacuate patients to facilities outside the zone, but if they cannot the city will step in to help with pooled ambulances and other public resources.

The commissioner of the Office of Emergency Management, Joseph Bruno, also said his agency is working with those hospitals and will dispatch firefighters to hospitals for onsite visits if a storm is approaching.

Eight “special needs” centers would also be in place for the disabled and elderly.

Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a critic of the plan since the revision began last year, said the new version is riddled with holes. He said the city has only a fraction of the vehicles it would need to shuttle people to shelters and that it is neglecting the elderly and the ill.

Mr. Brodsky also said he thinks the city should keep a central database of the homebound, although the OEM said such a database would not successfully document that population. Instead, OEM officials said, it makes more sense to work with Meals on Wheels, the Visiting Nurse Service, and other nonprofit groups that have regular contact with the homebound.

“You cannot leave it to social service organizations to evacuate the frail elderly,” Mr. Brodsky said.

A spokesman for the OEM, Jarrod Bernstein, said the city is doing nothing of the sort. Between city and school buses it could have up to 12,000 vehicles that would transport anyone in need, he said. He also said domestic pets such as cats and dogs would first be sent to shelters and kennels, but allowed into evacuation shelters if need be – and if they have muzzles or are in cages.

Mr. Bloomberg said OEM has sophisticated storm-tracking software and can identify storms thousands of miles out, days in advance.

If a mass evacuation is needed, he pledged to ask the state to waive fares on trains, buses, subways, and at the PATH so evacuees can easily get out.

The director of the Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response at New York University, K. Bradley Penuel, called the plan a “good first step.”

He said now that the city is being proactive and getting a dialogue going, more New Yorkers need get their own plans in order.

City Council Member John Liu, the chairman of the Transportation Committee, commended the Bloomberg administration for taking action, but said its plan is too reliant on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to help evacuate people by mass transit. That, he said, is not realistic.