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The United States would consider humanitarian aid to help North Korea following massive floods there, the State Department said Tuesday.

The reports of extensive damage has "caught our attention," department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.

"If there is a humanitarian need, we will take a look and see if we could help out in some way," he said.

The decision would be "based on needs and whatever we might have to offer," he said.

North Korea's state-run news agency on Monday reported "huge human and material losses" from torrential downpours that started on Aug. 7, leaving hundreds of people dead or missing and more than 63,000 families displaced from their flooded homes.

The communist state, usually reluctant to ask for outside help, appealed to the World Food Program, a U.N. relief agency, for food and other assistance.

Christopher Hill, the U.S. nuclear envoy currently traveling in China, talked to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about helping Pyongyang, McCormack said.

"I think we, like many other governments, will be looking into further details on it to see what can be done," Hill said while in Beijing. "We will certainly be looking at it very seriously."

McCormack said, however, that any aid to North Korea would be made through U.N. channels, separately from the six-nation nuclear talks.

South and North Korea, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan are members of the six-nation forum aimed at denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. In an agreement reached in February, the North would disable its nuclear programs in return for political and economic benefits provided by other governments. The benefits include a total of 1 million tons of heavy fuel oil or its equivalent.

McCormack ruled out a possibility of switching some of this fuel aid to flood relief.

"I think that would be a separate issue... keep that within the six-party framework," he said.

"Anything that we will take a look at here will be purely in the humanitarian thing through the U.N." WASHINGTON, Aug. 14 (Yonhap)