Relief agencies, state officials, soldiers and even amateur radio operators in North Dakota are working to provide whatever relief they can to victims of Hurricane Katrina.

For some, it's a waiting game.

"You feel relatively helpless right now," said Janell Regimbal, interim president and chief executive of Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota. "You see all these things and want to do something right away to help.

"We're in that wait-and-see mode," she said. "We will certainly stand ready to do our part. We're like the other volunteer agencies … waiting for the locals to say, 'here's what we need you to do.'"

Others have already found a role in the hurricane response.

North Dakota National Guard soldiers and airmen from Minot Air Force Base were preparing on Friday to join the relief effort.

Don Ronsberg, an operations specialist with the state Department of Emergency Services, was to travel to Baton Rouge, La., on Saturday, to work for two weeks in the state emergency operations center there.

Rick Robinson, a planning specialist for North Dakota's Emergency Services department, said other state officials might be heading south in the future.

"This is going to be a long, extended effort … so they're going to be rotating people in and out," Robinson said.

Gov. John Hoeven said the state will "do all we can to assist in this tragic situation."

At an American Red Cross call center in Minot, volunteers teamed up with ham radio operators on Wednesday to help save a group of people who were trapped atop a collapsing house in Bay St. Louis, Miss.

A caller informed Response Center Network volunteers of the situation, but center workers could not get through to emergency officials in the hurricane zone. The workers enlisted the help of the local ham radio club that operates out of the basement of the Minot Red Cross chapter.

"We relayed the information down to ham radio operators in the Gulf area who were in direct contact with the Coast Guard," said Paul Meisel, a member of the club. The people were rescued.

Meisel said the Minot amateur radio operators have been involved in about a dozen calls for help so far. "We're just doing what we can to help out," he said, adding that he had "lost count" of the number of hours he has logged this week.

The Red Cross center in Minot is one of 10 such centers operating nationwide, said Allan McGeough, executive director of the Mid-Dakota Chapter of the Red Cross. The center takes calls from disaster victims seeking information on such things as the location of shelters.