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Now that we’re prepared for a devastating Category 4 or 5 hurricane (right? right?), we can look forward to the next great disaster — a flu pandemic that will surely kill hundreds of thousands of city residents:

Be afraid, be very afraid. There is no telling what the next disaster will be. Another terrorist attack? A steam pipe explosion like the one that shut down several blocks of Lexington Avenue a year ago? Or perhaps a pandemic flu that would cripple New York City’s economy by making people afraid to go to work or ride on subways and buses?

That was the message at a daylong workshop conducted on Tuesday by the city’s health and emergency management agencies, intended to give businesses tips on how to cope with the potential calamities.

The workshop had all the portentous, overwrought atmosphere of movies about how the world is coming to an end and everyone had better be ready, from “War of the Worlds” to the latest M. Night Shyamalan film. Only in this faux disaster, the participants — some of whom have spent years immersing themselves in the subject — were treating it with deadly earnestness.

The possibility of an influenza pandemic was the disaster du jour. Dr. Isaac B. Weisfuse, the city’s deputy health commissioner for disease control, told an audience of about 300 business people that since history repeats itself, he considers it likely that there will be a worldwide outbreak of flu, possibly a mutation of the current avian flu, sometime in the 21st century, just as there were killer disease epidemics in virtually every other century.

“Everybody in the whole state — local governments, businesses large and small, families — should be preparing,” Dr. Weisfuse told the gathering at New York University.

Just as Americans built bomb shelters and stocked them with crackers during the Cold War, the city has been stockpiling supplies to combat pandemic flu, Dr. Weisfuse assured his audience. He announced that 25 million surgical face masks — known as P.P.E.’s, short for “personal protective equipment” — are secreted in a New York City warehouse.

“I’m very proud of this collection,” Dr. Weisfuse said, showing a slide of the rows upon rows of boxed-up masks, like the treasure in an Indiana Jones movie. “We have more face masks than you could ever imagine.”

But, still not enough. The stockpile is equal to three for each of the city’s eight million residents, and epidemiologists recommend changing those face masks twice a day. “Look at all these lovely boxes,” Dr. Weisfuse said. “They’re going to be empty after about a day and a half of pandemic.”

(One audience member, who said he managed a 42-story residential high-rise, wondered how many microns of particle size the mask should be able to guard against. Dr. Weisfuse replied, in essence, that it does not mater, because the masks are so loose that some germs are bound to escape from the sides.)