In the horror movie "Dark Water," Jennifer Connelly fights a losing battle against ceiling leaks and ghostly flooding in her Roosevelt Island rental. The cause, in her case, was the restless spirits of undead neighbors. But at a lively and often contentious town meeting held at the Chapel of the Good Shepherd on July 20, representatives from the City’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) outlined a similar scenario should hurricane season produce a weather system so fierce the Island would turn into an evacuation zone.

"What if I don’t want to leave?" asked one Islander after hearing the OEM’s plan for fleeing hurricanes of sufficient magnitude.

"You’ll want to leave," answered Ashley S. Kolberg, an OEM policy analyst.

She underscored that message with photos of a PATH station looking like Davy Jones’ locker during a 1992 nor’easter, plus descriptions of windows sucked from their frames and cars and boats taking airborne journeys to alternate zip codes.

The OEM has no record of anything approaching such ferocity in this area but, as the representatives took pains to point out, better safe than sorry. Taking its cues from the Hurricane Katrina debacle, the OEM is waging an aggressive public-education initiative, hoping to avoid the bureaucratic, logistical, medical, and public-relations disasters that flooded New Orleans in the wake of the storm. The Island is just one of many whistle-stops on the OEM’s slide-show tour, which presents a general – some would say generic – overview of how tropical storms upgrade in intensity to hurricanes, and what to pack and where to go to escape their wrath.

In the case of the Island, the closest of the City’s 65 Hurricane Evacuation Centers are the Newcomer School in Queens and Hunter College in Manhattan. From there, evacuees with no family or friends lined up would be parceled out among 509 City shelters – no pets allowed (except for service animals). Because of the complexity of such an evacuation, the OEM stresses the need to take personal responsibility, including securing appropriate insurance coverage, making contingency plans for pets and household members with special needs, packing "Go Bags," and stocking bottled water and supplies. The bottom line, according to Kolberg, is that government agencies could only do so much, so proper planning and early evacuation are optimal, as is using public transportation – notwithstanding the hours-long bottleneck that occurred after the Fourth of July fireworks.

On City maps of hurricane preparedness, Roosevelt Island is colored yellow – marking it as a Zone B area, susceptible to flooding from moderate hurricanes of Category 2 and above.

The good news is that, should such a storm head our way, there would be ample warning – up to 48 hours of mayoral directives and National Weather Service advisories. The breathless, minute-by-minute coverage of the stalled Tram would pale in comparison with the wall-to-wall media coverage and hoopla that would anticipate a major evacuation of low-lying and vulnerable areas of the City, where one in four New Yorkers is subject to evacuation. Presumably, even the most reclusive or ailing Islander would find it difficult to tune out the cacaphony of warnings and instructions.

The bad news is that the OEM’s directives for hurricane preparedness are not specifically tailored to the Island’s unique population, which includes a disproportionate number of the elderly and the frail, compounded by a limited choice of escape routes. Kolberg’s advice to "take the F train" in case of emergency was met with an outcry of horror, disbelief, ridicule and anger. Visions of descending into flooded subway tunnels or simply facing the kind of packed cars that frustrate the average rush-hour commuter served to amp up the level of hostility in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd.

And Deputy Commissioner Kelly McKinney’s assurance that dialing 311 would produce the appropriate pick-up vehicle for, say, an elderly person saddled with an oxygen tank, was also met with outrage and derision by audience members grappling with the image of an ambulance trying to buck the fleeing tide of evacuees over the bridge.

The OEM routinely deals with the threat of flood and gale-force winds, but its two embattled representatives seemed unprepared for the fire and brimstone they received from the audience of 65. During the Q&A session, one after another stood to complain about the lack of specificity of the presentation, and to outline the Island’s geographical and medical challenges.

"As unique as Roosevelt Island is, it’s interchangeable with the Rockaway Peninsula," McKinney explained – truthfully, if perhaps unwisely, considering the mood of the crowd. "They’re both long islands with limited egress. The situation out there, I’m hearing the same thing from those folks. I hear a lot of obvious frustration. We have responsibility not only for Roosevelt Island, but for seven million other people. We leverage ourselves through organizations like RIOC. What we will commit to do is to working with [RIOC employee] Mike [Moreo] and RIOC until we believe that there is a plan in place that addresses all the stuff you’re talking about. We’ll bring it back and present it to you folks."

Moreo followed up toward the end of the meeting with the kind of detail Islanders wanted – beefed-up bus service, door-to-door searches by Public Safety patrols, frequent hotline updates, and more.

Still, one disgusted Islander dismissed the OEM’s slide show as "an excellent plan for suburbia, not for Roosevelt Island," and, to great applause, vowed she would personally round up all her neighbors at 556 Main Street and march them over the bridge, if necessary.

Will it be necessary? New York is not generally thought of as a hurricane hotspot, yet the area is vulnerable – despite a shorter hurricane window than the rest of the country, from August 1 through October 30, because it takes longer for the waters here to warm sufficiently to host the particular petri dish that gives hurricanes their swirling force.

Normally, the start of hurricane season wouldn’t make a blip on the radar of New Yorkers. But this year, it happens to follow several weeks of weird local weather, including a tornado in Westchester, a heat wave that caused blackouts in Queens, and the release of the Al Gore documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which warns of a New York buried under the runoff of melting polar icecaps as a consequence of global warming. The OEM’s educational outreach program is designed to implant a healthy respect for such weather anomalies in the collective consciousness, perhaps somewhere in the mental bin that stores information about bird flu, Legionnaire’s disease, and the Ebola virus.

And, while an Ebola outbreak would be horrific, a gusty hurricane that knocks out the Island’s electrical, sewage, transportation, and other support systems is far more likely, statistically speaking. Thanks to a confluence of geographical factors (including the right-angled "New York Bight" coastline that could inflame a hurricane as a red flag does a bull), tall buildings, and population and transportation density, a major storm here could be deceptively catastrophic.

At times, the OEM’s July 20 presentation was like "Scared Straight," meant to frighten people into taking the threat seriously and getting their "Go-Bags" packed and ready. "There has never been a Category 4 hurricane in New York," Kolberg noted reassuringly, "but we’re preparing for the worst-case scenario."

Such a scenario would entail a Category 4 hurricane that makes landfall over Atlantic City, barreling our way with 131-155 mph winds and causing the evacuation of 2.3 million New Yorkers, 605,000 of whom would need public shelter.

By comparison, the more likely occurrence – a Category 2 storm – is far less to get excited about. Such a storm would feature sustained winds of 96-110 mph swirling counterclockwise and gaining strength as the weather system moves up the coast. It would spend itself after a few days.

Yet such a storm is just the one Islanders should be concerned about, according to the OEM. If one heads our way, staying put will not be an option, and expecting local or federal agencies to send a town car and white-gloved driver for everyone is unrealistic.

For more information on how to prepare for a hurricane, the OEM suggests calling 311, although they confirmed that, as little as two days before the town meeting, calls to 311 were met with stonewalling by functionaries who dismissed Roosevelt Island as the State’s problem, not the City’s, and directed callers to government websites.

Other sources of information include the OEM’s website at www.nyc.gov/oem, calling the RIOC hotline at 212-308-6608, and signing up for e-mail alerts from www.nyc.gov/oemnews. For information on how to make sure your insurance is up to date, contact Neighborhood Housing Services of New York City at 718-732-8125.