The former Special Operations soldier is also filing blog reports from New Orleans' devastated downtown area.A former Army Green Beret, and colleagues at a Web hosting service, are holed up in a commercial building in downtown New Orleans, with weeks of food and water and a diesel-powered electric generator, struggling to keep a segment of the Internet from going offline because of Hurricane Katrina, Ziff Davis Internet has learned.
The former Special Operations soldier with the U.S. Army also is filing reports from the scene in the devastated downtown area of the Big Easy at mgno.com, which he calls the "Survival of New Orleans Blog."
Michael Barnett, now crisis manager at Directnic.com, tells Ziff Davis Internet that his firm runs a data center where 2 percent of the Internet is hosted on the company's servers.
"We host Web pages—businesses," said Barnett in an interview conducted via AOL Instant Messenger on Wednesday. "We have to stay up. We go down, and so does 2 percent of the Internet."
Barnett says he spent two years in the Army infantry, and an additional six with the 20th Special Forces Group, which is now based at Birmingham, Ala.
Like others with a similar background, Barnett has been trained for long-duration, indirect activities including guerrilla warfare and other low visibility, or clandestine operations.
This has helped him, his colleagues—and his fiancée, who is staying with him at an undisclosed commercial site in downtown New Orleans—stay online, even though the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, ordered the city evacuated, and is using the military and police to enforce the order.
The Weblog reads like a report from war-torn Sudan or another Third World hotspot.
"There's a massive police staging area on Canal Street right by the casino," wrote Barnett on Tuesday at 12:16 p.m. "The 82nd Airborne is here in force. They're patrolling the city. There's a massive military staging area near the Convention Center by the I-10. The helicopter traffic is the most I've seen since I was stationed at Ft. Hood."
In addition to reports from the streets, Barnett is also reporting on how some businesses are getting power, like the Pan Am Building, "just down the street."
The DoubleTree hotel also reportedly has power again, he reported Monday.
Read the full story on eweek.com: Former Green Beret Stays Online in Katrina's Wake
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