The city’s plan to evacuate more than 2 million people in the event of a major hurricane fails to adequately address how disabled residents will be rescued, how hospitals will be emptied, and whether bus drivers and train operators will put themselves in danger to get people to safety, critics of the plan charged yesterday.

The plan, the subject of a City Council hearing yesterday, requires evacuees to initially travel to one of 23 “reception centers” located throughout the five boroughs, where they will be directed to shelters – a system some said would add a layer of red tape to the already massive challenge of evacuating portions of the most densely populated city in America.

“We are never going to be perfect, but we can be a hell of a lot better than we are today,” Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Democrat of Westchester, said before testifying.

New York City’s hurricane evacuation plans have been scrutinized since last month, when thousands of mostly low-income, minority residents were stranded in New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina hit. Interest intensified after the highways out of Houston were overwhelmed with bumper-to-bumper traffic last week while residents attempted to flee Hurricane Rita.

The commissioner of the city’s Office of Emergency Management, Joseph Bruno, said New York’s hurricane evacuation plans are sound but that his agency is learning from events in the Gulf Coast.

“Katrina and Rita woke a lot of people up,” Mr. Bruno said after testifying at the hearing. “I can’t say I was sleeping, but I was looking at” dealing with biological, chemical, and nuclear attacks.

“New York City is not a one-horse town,” he said. “We will bring out every asset of the city of New York.”

The commissioner said his agency would work with groups that serve the disabled throughout the city, but it has no central database of names and addresses to draw on in the event of an evacuation. He said there are 19 hospitals and 58 nursing homes within the “storm surge” zone, and the city will ensure that each facility is implementing its evacuation plan if need be.

Mr. Brodsky, who recently released a report criticizing the city’s weather-related evacuation plans, said that was not enough.

“They admitted today … that they don’t have evacuation plans for nursing homes and hospitals, that they are relying on their plans, which don’t necessarily exist in any effective form,” Mr. Brodsky, who plans to run for state attorney general, said.

The chairman of the council’s public safety committee, Peter Vallone Jr., said the city’s plan is comprehensive and noted that New York is more prepared than most big cities. He also said he had concerns and pointed out that evacuation plans for terrorist attacks and other catastrophes also must be examined.

Like several other council members, he said the OEM could not take the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s word that it was prepared to help in the event of an evacuation. Mr. Vallone said the transit workers union – whose members are a crucial part of the city’s plan – submitted testimony saying it had not even discussed the evacuation scenario with MTA managers.

Mr. Bruno commended MTA management and said the 23 reception centers were in place because they are easily accessible by public transportation. “We’re not moving everyone 100 miles, as they did in Houston. We’re bringing people to high ground. New York City is not below the water table.”

Mr. Brodsky said, however, the city needs to plan for moving people outside the city. “This plan, as best we understand it, does not evacuate any people outside the borders of New York City,” he said.

A spokesman for the OEM, Jarrod Bernstein, said later in the day that the city does have plans to evacuate people for other emergencies, but that a hurricane would probably only require getting them out of “surge” regions.