The Chronicle: 10/13/2005: Sharing a World of Experience

The Chronicle: 10/13/2005: Sharing a World of Experience: "Sharing a World of Experience
Foreign-aid groups offer advice in hurricanes' aftermath

By Ian Wilhelm

When Arthur B. Keys Jr., a veteran international-aid worker, visited Katrina-ravaged parts of Mississippi, he felt a disturbing sense of deja vu.

'There's a one-mile swath along the coast where this 45-foot storm surge came in,' he says, 'and it looks just like Banda Aceh, in Indonesia,' after the tsunamis hit.

Mr. Keys, president of International Relief and Development, says the scope of the Gulf Coast devastation and its uncanny parallel to the deadly waves that struck South Asia last December, prompted his Arlington, Va.-based organization to provide assistance for the first time to a disaster in the United States."