After an Islamic State sympathizer rammed a truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in 2016, horrified New Orleans leaders were anxious to protect their city’s famed French Quarter, where crowds of revelers pack the cobblestone streets, especially during big events like Mardi Gras.

By the next year, steel columns known as bollards were installed to restrict vehicle access to Bourbon Street. The posts retracted to allow for deliveries to its bars and restaurants, until — gummed up by Mardi Gras beads, beer and other detritus — their tracks stopped working reliably.

So when New Year’s Eve arrived, the bollards were gone. They were being replaced ahead of the Super Bowl, which New Orleans will host on Feb. 9.

That left a critical security gap as thousands of New Year’s revelers crowded Bourbon Street. Shamsud-din Jabbar, a U.S. Army veteran inspired by the Islamic State group, exploited that gap when he drove a truck onto a sidewalk early Wednesday and sped around a police car stationed as a temporary barricade, killing 14 people.

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Foreseeable and Preventable Attack

It was the attack New Orleans had feared since the deadly 2016 rampage in the French Riviera city of Nice that killed 86 people — and one that could have been prevented or limited with temporary or permanent vehicle barriers, said Rob Reiter, an expert on protecting retail stores and crowds from accelerating vehicles for the Security Industry Association.

“This was foreseeable and predictable and preventable,” Reiter said. “It’s clearly a failure of safety and security.”

The terrorism threat to New Orleans was long apparent. Five years ago, a New York-based firm was hired to conduct a “discreet, confidential physical security and vulnerability assessment” of the city’s French Quarter.

A confidential portion of the firm’s report addressed concerns about the threat of a vehicular ramming attack, The New York Times reported. It also warned the city’s Bourbon Street bollards did “not appear to work” and recommended fixing them immediately.

A public version of the firm’s report for the French Quarter Management District — a political subdivision of the state of Louisiana — merely called for imposing more vehicle restrictions on Bourbon Street. It mentioned the threat of terrorism only in passing.

“It’s very troubling that this problem was identified in 2019 and the incoming City Council was not made aware of this recommendation, nor were we made aware of what steps were being taken to resolve this significant issue,” New Orleans Councilman JP Morrell told The Associated Press on Friday.

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Lessons from Nice and Maintenance Issues

Former New Orleans Police Superintendent Michael Harrison, who led the department from 2014 until 2019, said the bollards were reinforced by large public service vehicles such as dump and trash trucks, placed to prevent other vehicles from entering. Harrison said he and then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu wanted to further “fortify” the bollards.

“It was a lesson learned from Nice,” Harrison said Thursday. “I remember vividly the mayor saying, ‘We have to learn the lesson now. Let’s do it now.'”

But Reiter, whose association represents companies that manufacture and install bollards, said the city failed to adequately maintain the tracks the bollards moved on. The tracks got “gummed up” by everything from beer to Mardi Gras beads and stopped working reliably, he said.

Concentric Security, an Alabama-based firm that provided oversight for the installation of the bollards, said the system functioned as envisioned at the time.

“But we did observe Mardi Gras beads and other debris inside the bollard wells after a routine examination” later, a company spokesperson said. The company declined to release additional details, citing confidentiality concerns.

Heald LTD, the United Kingdom-based company that designed the bollards installed in 2017, said “basic maintenance and cleaning is all that is required” for upkeep.

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New Security Measures and Missed Opportunities

City officials were removing the Heald-designed barriers and replacing them with a different system of stainless steel bollards before the upcoming Super Bowl.

Reiter questioned why the city did not deploy temporary physical barriers that it owns for New Year’s Eve.

“Had they taken the usual measures and done them in the usual proximity to where he made his turn, they absolutely stop this thing,” Reiter said.

“If they put the measures further back, it’s possible that he would have had enough speed to get past the first set of barriers but he would have disabled the vehicle. So the amount of penetration would have been much smaller and the casualties would have been much fewer,” Reiter added.

Harrison, the former police commissioner, said the bollards alone may not have prevented the bloodshed.

“He had explosive devices in the truck. He had guns. He had other things that he could have gotten out of the truck and done as much damage outside of the truck,” said Harrison, who now runs a New Orleans-based consulting company.

Michael Rodriguez, vice president at California-based 1-800-Bollards, said his company recently shipped 106 stainless steel bollards to New Orleans for its Bourbon Street project.

He said the city requested part of the shipment be expedited so installation could be completed before the Super Bowl, and the company put the order on a fast track.

But, Rodriguez said, the public will never know what impact they could have had on the attack.

“They weren’t installed. That’s the obstacle,” he said. “Bollards are great for a visual and an actual barrier. But if they aren’t installed or deployed or engaged, then they’re really not going to do anything.”