The city’s emergency evacuation plan faced heavy criticism yesterday as a state assemblyman said it is “inadequate.”

The assemblyman, Richard Brodsky, sparred with the city’s emergency management commissioner, Joseph Bruno, who testified under subpoena that the city could handle a weather disaster.

In the two months since Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the city’s disaster preparations have come under renewed scrutiny from Mr. Brodsky, who convened hearings to examine recently revised plans to evacuate as many as 2 million New Yorkers. He issued subpoenas for Mr. Bruno and a broad range of documents, including all correspondence about emergency preparedness among several city agencies.

“I believe that we dodged a bullet,” Mr. Brodsky said. “Good luck can be banked on once, but it can’t be used next year.”

Mr. Brodsky, the chairman of the Assembly’s committee on corporations, authorities, and commissions, took issue yesterday with several aspects of the city’s plan, including the evacuation of nursing homes and other health care facilities, the use of “reception centers” to triage evacuees, and an overall campaign to educate New Yorkers about emergency preparedness.

Officials came out of yesterday’s hearing saying progress had been made on the city’s evacuation plans, but that much remained incomplete, particularly in preparations for nursing homes. The committee heard testimony from representatives of the Greater New York Health Care Facilities Association, who said that although they were working on delivering emergency plans for individual facilities, those plans only provided for removing patients from buildings, not transporting them to a safe destination.

“There is great confusion on the part of the nursing home industry as to exactly what they are supposed to do,” Mr. Brodsky said. He later added, “It seems like the plan is only going to get them to the sidewalk.”

Mr. Brodsky criticized the city’s reception center plan, in which residents in high-risk areas would first go to one of 23 facilities that would process them be fore sending them on to shelters. He noted that more than half of the reception centers could not accommodate parking, even in the outer boroughs where many residents own cars. Mr. Bruno responded that the city would urge residents to use mass transportation.

“That system will be what will allow us to move the number of people we have to move,” the commissioner said.

Mr. Brodsky remained unconvinced. “I think it makes no sense to have reception centers with no parking,” he said.

As Mr. Brodsky pressed Mr. Bruno for specifics in an exchange that was often combative, the commissioner testified that the city’s plan was necessarily “dynamic,” and that agencies would adjust to conditions on the ground and deploy resources as needed.

He listed more than 4,500 publicly owned vehicles that the agency could use to transport special needs residents, but

he also said officials would reach out to private companies and redeploy city buses if more vehicles were needed. And if, for example, officials judged that more parking was necessary at a reception center, they could close off area streets to accommodate that need, he said.

Mr. Brodsky, a Democrat who is running for state attorney general next year, was adamant that Mr. Bruno turn over all documents requested in the subpoena, many of which he said were missing yesterday. Though the two officials chatted amicably after the hearing, Mr. Brodsky said the subpoena remained in effect and did not rule out the possibility of litigation.

For his part, Mr. Bruno acknowledged that the committee hearings had gotten his attention, but disputed Mr. Brodsky’s main contention, that the city is unprepared. “It’s a fully adequate plan,” he said. “We will move everyone out of the zones.”