The chaotic evacuations of New Orleans and Houston have prompted local officials across the country to take another look at plans for emptying their cities in response to a large-scale natural disaster or a terrorist attack. What they have found is not wholly reassuring.

From Los Angeles to Boston, from Seattle to Miami, plans to relocate, house and feed potentially hundreds of thousands of displaced people are embryonic at best and nonexistent at worst. As the exodus from Houston this week demonstrated, in many places highways would clog quickly, confusion would reign and police resources would soon be overtaxed. New Orleans offered a different and more deadly example of what could go wrong, as tens of thousands of people, many of them poor and lacking private transportation, could be left to fend for themselves in cities without basic services or law enforcement.

Most major American cities have made preparations for localized emergencies like fires, floods or large toxic spills that might involve the relocation of a few thousand or tens of thousands of people. Since Sept. 11, 2001, cities have received billions of dollars from the newly formed Department of Homeland Security to prepare for a major terrorist attack.

Los Angeles, the nation's second-most-populous city, sits atop a spider web of earthquake faults, several of which could slip with devastating consequences, leveling large parts of the city and touching off widespread fires and explosions. But the city has no plan for moving and sheltering the large number of people who would be made homeless by such a disaster, officials concede.

San Francisco's evacuation plans depend in large part on the two main bridges that connect the city with Oakland to the east and Marin County to the north. Both are vulnerable to a major earthquake, as is the Bay Area Rapid Transit tunnel beneath the bay. The plans call for the use of fishing boats and ferries to get people across the bay if other routes are blocked, a stopgap solution at best.

Philadelphia is also dependent on bridges and elevated highways to get people out in an emergency, and the city has drawn up no detailed plans for evacuation since early in the cold war, officials said. Gov. Edward G. Rendell has ordered every city in Pennsylvania to prepare for large-scale evacuations, with an emphasis on the large number of people in major cities who do not own cars.

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Government at all levels cast tens of thousands of people into its response to the World Trade Center attacks yesterday, but the magnitude, timing and location of the assault overwhelmed even the well-practiced emergency plans of a city and state conditioned by years of terrorist threat and violence.

Within the very target picked by the attackers, the World Trade Center was New York City's two-year-old Emergency Command Center, which was supposed to act as the nerve center in any calamity. Instead, it was rendered useless within minutes, and hours later lay buried in a funeral mound of rubble.

Little of all the planning or the possible scenarios that experts had envisioned after the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 could have prepared emergency and city officials yesterday for this situation: one disaster upon another, with the potential to kill all or most of those responding.

With telephone lines and cellular service overloaded -- the Trade Center towers themselves were a major link in the city's cellular transmission service -- city and state officials were left groping in the first hours for any way to gather and communicate information. Mr. Giuliani and a phalanx of other city officials were forced to flee a makeshift command post and walk miles through billowing dust looking for a place to work.

Crucial buildings a short walk from the Trade Center -- like City Hall, where dust and ash an inch thick coated the steps and swirled into the deserted rotunda, and the Police Department headquarters at One Police Plaza -- were evacuated, making official communication all the more difficult. Transit officials shut down the entire subway system for several hours.

Initially, officials set up shop in the Emergency Command Center on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center, a stone's throw from the twin towers, but officials concluded the building should be evacuated.

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A congressional report to be released this week slams the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, calling it a "failure of leadership" that left people stranded when they were most in need.

"Our investigation revealed that Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare," the report said. "At every level -- individual, corporate, philanthropic and governmental -- we failed to meet the challenge that was Katrina. In this cautionary tale, all the little pigs built houses of straw."

Panel: 'America is still not ready for prime time'

The House committee's report noted widespread failures among government agencies to share critical information in the wake of Katrina and equally widespread confusion over issues of responsibility.

But it also looked at the government's failure to respond to a catastrophe that had long been predicted.” In many respects, our report is a litany of mistakes, misjudgments, lapses and absurdities all cascading together, blinding us to what was coming and hobbling any collective effort to respond," one of the draft excerpts said.

"Too often there were too many cooks in the kitchen, and because of that the response to Katrina was at times overdone, at times underdone. Too often, because everybody was in charge, nobody was in charge," the committee said.

"If this is what happens when we have advance warning, we shudder to imagine the consequences when we do not. Four and a half years after 9/11, America is still not ready for prime time. This is particularly distressing because we know we remain at risk for terrorist attacks, and because the 2006 hurricane season is right around the corner."

Having a national response plan to deal with disasters "is not enough," the committee said.

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New York City's health care system is not prepared for a major disaster such as a large-scale attack, hurricane or pandemic, health care and disaster planning experts said.

The city, struck in the Sept. 11 attacks and a world financial center, is vulnerable due to under funding and a lack of understanding of the possible complexities of a crisis, officials from city hospitals and emergency services said this week at a conference on disaster preparedness.

Disaster preparedness in the United States has been a leading preoccupation of U.S. authorities since the Sept. 11 attacks. That concern was heightened after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and other parts of the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, killing more than 1,400 people and revealing gaping holes in local and federal planning.

"We have no idea what a prepared New York is. What we're doing now is random acts of preparedness that all together don't really amount to an appropriate safety net," said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

"We're in a very, very bad place." "We're in the financial capital of the world ... I see that emergency room as an element of our national defense," Logan said. "Unfortunately, I can't get our government officials -- especially the state and federal ones -- to see it the same way."

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