NEW ORLEANS – Vehicle attacks are a growing global terrorist threat that can be difficult to prevent, but the deadly attack on New Year’s revelers in New Orleans shows how a city’s efforts to protect a vulnerable, highly populated area can backfire. insufficient, experts said.
New Orleans did not deploy anti-vehicle barriers that the city had possessed for years before the attack, and other barriers, known as bollards, had recently been removed because they were malfunctioning and needed to be replaced.
The city was warned of the potential danger more than five years ago, when a corporate intelligence firm urged local authorities to fix the faulty bollard system. The 2019 Interfor International report, excerpts of which were obtained by NBC News and first reported by The New York Times, warned that a vehicle ramming incident was one of the most likely potential terrorist attacks that could hit the neighborhood. French.
“New Orleans has mobile vehicle barriers designed to block streets and sidewalks,” Don Aviv, executive director of Interfor International, told NBC News on Friday. “The fact that they haven’t covered this area seems ridiculous.”
Aviv believes New Orleans police should have deployed their highest level of security possible, as they do during Mardi Gras, for an event like New Year’s Eve that draws a packed crowd to Bourbon Street.
The city has highly effective steel Archer vehicle barriers, but did not place them on the sidewalks of Bourbon Street until a day after the attack.
In a statement Friday afternoon, Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser called it “a complete failure of the responsibility to keep the city safe, from the top down, by not having those barriers in place or even being aware of them.” .
New Orleans officials defended the city’s safety on New Year’s Eve, noting that police had set up temporary barriers, vehicles and law enforcement personnel throughout the French Quarter. Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick described the attacker, who drove a van around a police car and then ran down the sidewalk of Bourbon Street, as “a terrorist” who was “bent on destruction.”
“This man was going to do the best he could, and if it hadn’t been at Bourbon, he would have gone somewhere else,” he said.
Bourbon Street reopened Thursday with a heavy police presence and additional anti-vehicle protections, including Archer barriers. Later that night, those new measures were visible, but at least two side streets leading into Bourbon did not appear to be completely sealed off and only had light bike rack-style barricades.
In response to questions, the New Orleans Police Department said it would not detail its security measures, but “we continually evaluate and adjust these plans to keep the community safe.”
The carnage that unfolded on Bourbon Street is part of an international pattern that is not new but has proven persistently difficult to stop. Attacks on vehicles have increased globally in recent years, security and counterterrorism experts said, as attackers can easily (and legally) access vehicles and blend into traffic until the moment they attack, when they can unleash mass violence directed at large crowds without special training.
The deadliest incident occurred in 2016 in Nice, France, when a truck driver plowed into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day, killing more than 80 people; ISIS claimed responsibility. The following year, an Islamic extremist in a rented truck plowed through a pedestrian and bicycle path in Manhattan, killing eight people. Last month, a man with anti-Islam and anti-immigration views stormed a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, killing five people and injuring hundreds more.
Over the past decade, this grim series of attacks has led cities, including New Orleans, to install new security barriers in areas with heavy foot traffic. Options include permanent concrete blocks, metal bollards that can be retracted to allow emergency vehicles to pass, temporary metal barricades, police vehicles and trucks filled with sand. All can be effective and all have the potential to fail if there is even a small gap.
“It only takes one point of failure for a vehicle to travel and cause destruction,” said Ryan Houser, whose 2022 study in the British Medical Journal found that of the 257 recorded terrorist attacks involving a vehicle between 1970 and 2019, the 71% took place in the last six years of the research examined.
“In 2016, vehicle attacks were the deadliest form of attack and accounted for just over half of all terrorism-related deaths in that year,” according to the study by Houser, a biodefense doctoral student and terrorism researcher. at the Schar School of George Mason University. of Politics and Government.
The most effective way to stop attacks would be to stop them in advance, but this is also challenging because perpetrators are often radicalized online and may act silently and alone.
“In modern society it’s not difficult to get a vehicle,” said Brian Michael Jenkins, director of the National Transportation Safety Center at the Mineta Transportation Institute, a research and training organization. “It can be turned into a deadly weapon and the target is just around the corner.”
While protecting large crowds of pedestrians is difficult, “it can be done,” Jenkins said, citing the annual New Year’s Eve ball drop in New York City that draws hundreds of thousands of people.
The 2016 Nice attack prompted New Orleans to install the bollards on Bourbon Street the following year, but they soon failed. In its 2019 safety report for the French Quarter Management District, a tourism and public safety group, Interfor International said it had “received conflicting explanations as to why the existing bollard system is rarely used.”
“Some residents and business owners reported that beads frequently fall onto the tracks, causing devices to temporarily inoperable,” the report continues. “Others claim there are not enough personnel available to deploy them under the current schedule.”
The system should be fixed or improved “immediately,” according to the report.
The French Quarter Management District said in a statement Friday night that since its creation it has “focused on public safety.”
The district said that in 2019, a board commissioned a study on French Quarter safety and shared it with its partners in the city of New Orleans and made its recommendations public.
Heald, the company that manufactured the bollards, said in a statement: “Like any operational product, it is vital to carry out daily operational and ongoing maintenance on those products to ensure they function effectively.”
When Interfor’s safety recommendation was made public, construction to replace the bollards was already underway, but it was too late.
At about 3:15 a.m. Wednesday, an ISIS-inspired man drove onto a sidewalk, around a police car and other temporary barriers and crashed a rented van into people celebrating the New Year on Bourbon Street, authorities said. The man then opened fire on police, wounding two officers before being killed in the shootout. At least 14 people were killed and dozens more were injured.
Hours later, when asked if police had considered the possibility of a driver running onto the sidewalk on Bourbon Street, Capt. Lejon Roberts responded, “It wasn’t something we expected to take into account.”
When a reporter pressed Roberts on this point, Governor Jeff Landry intervened.
“This is evil, and that guy could have easily walked down the sidewalk on Canal Street, where there were also a ton of pedestrians,” Landry said. He added: “When there are flaws in this system, we will be transparent and address them with the city and make sure we fill those gaps to the best of our ability.”
Joseph Hauss, president of Gibraltar Perimeter Security, which manufactured steel bollards used to reinforce the Manhattan waterfront path where the 2017 attack occurred, as well as the Las Vegas Strip, was dismayed to hear that the city had not accounted a vehicle that crossed onto the sidewalk.
“This is a disappointment for our industry,” he texted a colleague when he learned of the attack. He added in an interview: “Bourbon Street was protected, it just wasn’t protected properly.”
While nothing is foolproof, Hauss said working bollards, which cost between $8,000 and $10,000 each, would have at least slowed down the driver.
“The truck could have jumped the bollard, but there’s no doubt it wouldn’t have gotten that far,” he said.
Bourbon Street workers echoed the sense of betrayal when they returned to their jobs this week.
“I think the city failed us,” said Wayne Jones, 50, a security guard at a Bourbon Street bar.
According to him, the area should have been better secured on New Year’s Eve before the attack. The Archer steel barriers the city installed on the sidewalks of Bourbon Street on Thursday, manufactured by Meridian Rapid Defense Group, would have come in handy on the night when the street was packed with New Year’s revelers.
“Why wasn’t that on the sidewalk?” -Jones asked. “That would have stopped him,” he added about the attacker.
Jones and other local workers also questioned the decision to replace street safety bollards that have long been malfunctioning during the winter, which is the busiest time in the French Quarter.
“It seems worse than bad planning,” said Rory Windhorst, who works at a business on Bourbon Street near the site of the attack. He noted that the city was investing money in preparation for the Super Bowl in February and questioned whether there had been a “serious miscalculation” in the way resources were used.
The city issued a statement Thursday saying it “is committed to ensuring the safety and functionality of Bourbon Street” and that replacing the bollards is part of that commitment.
Laura Strickler reported from Washington, Daniella Silva reported from New York, and Jesse Kirsch and Bracey Harris reported from New Orleans.
