NEW ORLEANS — Malfunctioning security bollards were removed from Bourbon Street ahead of the New Year’s Day early morning terror attack in which a man drove his truck down the packed thoroughfare, killing at least 14 people and injuring dozens of others, according to an NBC News report.
City officials said during a press conference on Wednesday that other barriers, vehicles and law enforcement officers “deployed strategically” on Bourbon Street “failed to prevent the attacker from driving onto the sidewalk, where he ran into pedestrians at about 3:15 a.m. local time on New Year’s Day, the report says.
“Bollards were not up because they are near completion, with the expectation of being completed before the Super Bowl,” New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said at the press conference.
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Police were aware of the security issue and “harden[ed] those target areas where the bollards” had stood with “patrol cars and other measures,” New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said at the news conference.
“We did have a car there, we had barriers there, we had officers there and they still got around,” she said. “In this particular case, the terrorist just went all the way around up onto the sidewalk.”
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The FBI is investigating the attack — in which a gunman drove through the crowd and then exchanged fire with police, wounding two officers before he was killed — as an act of terrorism, NBC News says. Authorities found several potential explosive devices but said Thursday that they believe the attacker acted alone.
“We recognize we’ve got a [security] problem,” Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry said at Wednesday’s news conference. “We’re going to fix it. It is going to be a top priority as we go into the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras, and the solution that we’re going to come up with is going to be a permanent one.”
New Orleans installed the bollards on Bourbon Street several years ago to “guard against an attack like the one in Nice, France, in 2016, which killed more than 80 people when a truck plowed through a crowd of pedestrians,” according to the report. But the bollards soon malfunctioned, clogged with Mardi Gras beads and the police found them inefficient, Cantrell said at the news conference.
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An engineer who worked on the bollard replacement project, who spoke to NBC News on the condition of anonymity because the team was not authorized to speak publicly, said there was “a mad dash to rush this job” so it could be done in time for the Super Bowl, scheduled for Feb. 9.
New Orleans plans to replace the bollards on Bourbon Street from Canal Street to St. Ann Street with “new removable stainless-steel bollards” that could be securely locked behind each crosswalk, according to the city website.
The construction began in November with the removal of the old bollards, and then the replacement proceeded in phases, the city said. It was expected to be finished in February, according to NBC News.
New Orleans City Council President Helena Moreno told WWL-TV she and other council members believed the repairs should have been completed further in advance of the Super Bowl. Still, she said, she did not believe the bollards would have prevented the mass killing.
“This person was ready to inflict pain and death and harm on crowds in Bourbon Street, and I think he would have tried to find whatever way that he could,” Moreno said.
This article originally ran on our sister publication, Security Sales & Integration.
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