It happened before - it'll happen again!

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It happened before - it'll happen again!

City awakening to threat of another 'cane

BY HELEN KENNEDY and ADAM LISBERG
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Government experts warned America yesterday to brace for another season of up to six cataclysmic hurricanes - as New York officials scramble to prepare our dangerously vulnerable city.

"That's not good news, and the message is very clear - we have to be prepared," said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center.

Experts say it probably won't be as bad as last year, but that's not too comforting: 2005 was the worst storm season ever recorded and forecasters didn't see it coming.

And scientists agree that in the next half-century, New York will be hit with a tropical storm or a hurricane - and there's a 1-in-4 chance that it will reach Category 3 or worse, causing untold damage to a city unprepared for natural disasters.

"We are as vulnerable as any city around," said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn, Queens). "If we have a bad storm this season, nobody is going to be able to say we weren't warned."

City officials are scrambling to rewrite disaster plans and spread the word about the danger - as well as to move their emergency operations center from a Brooklyn waterfront site to higher ground.

"We recognized that we needed to improve," said Jarrod Bernstein, spokesman for the Office of Emergency Management, which will soon move to a new bunker in downtown Brooklyn. "We've done a lot of work in the off-season."

New York is almost as vulnerable to hurricanes as New Orleans and Miami, experts say, because is a coastal city built around rivers at a corner of the Atlantic Ocean.

A strong hurricane would flood almost every inch of New York's shoreline, as well as far inland along waterways like the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and Newtown Creek on the Brooklyn-Queens border.

All of Manhattan below Worth St. would be underwater, as well as much of central Brooklyn and Queens rising from Jamaica Bay - and all of Coney Island and the Rockaways.

The 1938 storm that swept Long Island could have devastated the city if it had taken a slightly different tack, and an 1821 hurricane flooded Canal St., slicing Manhattan in two.

But those memories have long faded - and emergency preparedness officials hope Katrina's spectacle of devastation can spur New Yorkers to start preparing for the worst.

New York's evacuation plan calls for people to take subways or buses to 65 emergency centers, then be bused to shelters.

Critics say it relies too much on buses, doesn't do enough to help the elderly and disabled and would be too confusing in a crisis.

The Gulf Coast is also eying the eastern oceans with fear: Even a minor hurricane could be devastating to hundreds of thousands of Katrina victims still in flimsy temporary housing, and New Orleans levees are still too fragile to take much strain.

"We now have a much larger vulnerable population and it will not take a Category 4 or 5 to devastate that community," said Robert Latham, director of emergency management for Mississippi.