This article originally provided by Yahoo

September 2, 2005

Irony of Ironies: U.N. Offers Disaster Assistance to U.S. 9/2

The United Nations has created a special task force ready to dispatch disaster experts to the U.S. to help in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Friday.

"We are on standby, the alert has been given," said Elizabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman at the U.N. office known as OCHA. "We have created a task force to ensure a fast and efficient response."

Byrs said OCHA had alerted the worldwide members of its U.N. Disaster Assessment and Coordination Center (UNDAC) to tell them that they might be deployed within the next hours.

OCHA's alert comes several hours after U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan offered to help the U.S. with the victims of Katrina.

The U.N.'s children fund, one of the U.N. agencies involved in the task force, said it was particularly worried about the children in areas struck by Katrina. UNICEF said there could be as many as 400,000 children who may remain without shelter for a few weeks or even months.

"The U.S. has the financial means to react to this catastrophe, but we can help with technical experts and ... psychological assistance," said Damien Personnaz, spokesman for UNICEF.

He said the last time he remembered the international community offering to assist the U.S. with a catastrophe was in the wake of the 1989, 6.9 magnitude earthquake centered near Santa Cruz.

There are over one hundred UNDAC experts across the world. The highly trained experts specialize on a wide range of issues from flooding to earthquakes and health crises. Five teams helped in the Indian Ocean area with last December's tsunami.