Vehicle attacks are difficult to prevent — but New Orleans fell short, experts say

NEW ORLEANS — Vehicle attacks are a rising global terror threat that can be difficult to prevent — but the deadly assault on New Year’s revelers in New Orleans shows how a city’s efforts to protect a heavily crowded and vulnerable area can fall short, experts said.

New Orleans failed to deploy anti-vehicle barriers that the city had owned for years ahead of 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 report by Interfor International, excerpts of which were obtained by NBC News and first reported by The New York Times, cautioned that a vehicle ramming incident was one of the most likely potential terrorist attacks that could strike the French Quarter.

“New Orleans does have mobile vehicle barriers that are designed to block streets and sidewalks,” Don Aviv, CEO of Interfor International, told NBC News on Friday. “The fact that they didn’t cover this area seems ridiculous.”

Aviv believes New Orleans police should have deployed their highest possible level of security, 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 set them out on Bourbon Street’s sidewalks until a day after the attack.

In a statement on Friday afternoon, Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser called it “a complete failure of responsibility to keep the city safe, from the top down, by not having those barriers in place or even having knowledge of them.”

New Orleans officials have defended the city’s security on New Year’s Eve, noting that police had installed temporary barriers, vehicles and law enforcement personnel throughout the French Quarter. Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick described the attacker, who drove a pickup truck around a police car and then careened down the sidewalk on Bourbon Street, as “a terrorist” who was “hell-bent on destruction.”

“This man was going to do his best, and if it hadn’t been on Bourbon, he was going to go somewhere else,” she said.

Bourbon Street reopened Thursday with a large law enforcement presence and additional anti-vehicle protections, including the Archer barriers. Later that night, those new measures were visible, but at least two side streets leading to Bourbon did not appear to be fully sealed off and had only lightweight bicycle rack-style barricades.

In response to questions, the New Orleans Police Department said it would not detail its security measures, but “we continuously 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. Vehicle attacks have increased globally in recent years, counterterrorism and security experts said, as assailants can easily — and legally — access vehicles and blend into traffic until the moment they strike, when they can unleash mass violence targeting large crowds without special training.

The deadliest incident was 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 rental truck rampaged through a pedestrian and cycling path in Manhattan, killing eight people. Last month, a man with anti-Islamic and anti-immigration views rammed into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, killing five people and injuring hundreds more.

Over the past decade, this grim spate of attacks has led cities, including New Orleans, to install new security barriers in areas with heavy pedestrian traffic. Options include permanent concrete blocks, metal bollards that can retract to let emergency vehicles through, temporary metal barricades, police vehicles, and trucks filled with sand. All can be effective — and all have the potential to fail if there’s even a small gap.

“It just takes one point of failure for a vehicle to get around and cause destruction,” said Ryan Houser, whose 2022 study in the British Medical Journal found that out of the 257 recorded terror attacks involving a vehicle from 1970 to 2019, 71% took place in the last six years the research examined.

“By 2016, vehicle attacks were the most lethal form of attack comprising just over half of all terrorism-related deaths in that year,” according to the study by Houser, who is a biodefense doctoral student and terrorism researcher at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.

The most effective way to halt the attacks would be to stop them in advance, but this is also challenging because perpetrators are often radicalized online and can act quietly and alone.

“It’s not difficult in modern society to get a vehicle,” said Brian Michael Jenkins, director of the National Transportation Security 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 spurred New Orleans to install the bollards on Bourbon Street the following year, but they soon malfunctioned. In its 2019 security 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 into the tracks rendering the devices temporarily inoperable,” the report continued. “Others claim there are not enough personnel available to deploy them on the existing schedule.”

The system should be fixed or improved “immediately,” the report said.

The French Quarter Management District said in a statement Friday evening that since its inception, it “has been focused on public safety.”

The district said that in 2019, a board commissioned a study on the safety and security of the French Quarter and shared it with its partners in the city of New Orleans and made its recommendations public.

Heald, the company that made bollards, said in a statement: “Like any operational product, it is vital to undertake daily operational and ongoing maintenance of those products to ensure the product operates effectively.”

By the time Interfor’s security recommendation became public, the construction to replace the bollards was underway — but it was too late.

At about 3:15 a.m. on Wednesday, a man inspired by ISIS drove onto a sidewalk and around a police car and other temporary barriers and slammed a rented pickup truck into people celebrating New Year’s on Bourbon Street, authorities said. The man then opened fire on police, wounding two officers before dying in the shootout. At least 14 people were killed and dozens more were injured.

Asked hours later whether the police had considered the possibility of a driver mounting the sidewalk on Bourbon Street, Capt. Lejon Roberts replied: “It wasn’t something we expected to account for.”

When a reporter pressed Roberts on the point, Gov. Jeff Landry jumped in.

“This is evil, and that guy could have easily gone down the sidewalk of Canal Street, where there were a ton of pedestrians on there as well,” Landry said. He added, “Where there are defects in this system, we are going to be transparent and we are going to address them with the city and make sure that we fill those gaps as best we can.”

Joseph Hauss, president Gibraltar Perimeter Security, which manufactured steel bollards used to harden the Manhattan waterfront path where the 2017 attack occurred, as well as the Las Vegas Strip, was appalled to hear that the city hadn’t accounted for a vehicle crossing onto the sidewalk.

“This is a letdown for our industry,” he texted a colleague when he heard about the attack. He added in an interview: “Bourbon Street was protected — it just wasn’t protected properly.”

While nothing is foolproof, Hauss said that functioning bollards, which cost $8,000 to $10,000 apiece, would have at least slowed the driver.

“The truck could have jumped the bollard, but there’s no doubt it would not have gone as far as it did,” he said.

The sense of betrayal was echoed by Bourbon Street workers as they returned to their jobs this week.

“I think the city failed us,” said Wayne Jones, 50, a security guard at a bar on Bourbon Street.

He believes the area should have been better secured on New Year’s Eve ahead of the attack. The steel Archer barriers that the city installed on the sidewalks on Bourbon Street on Thursday, made by Meridian Rapid Defense Group, would have been useful on the night the street was packed with New Year’s revelers.

“Why wasn’t that on the sidewalk?” Jones asked. “That would have slowed him down,” he added of the attacker.

Jones and other local workers also questioned the decision to replace the street’s long-malfunctioning security bollards during the winter, which is the busiest time for the French Quarter.

“It seems worse than poor planning,” said Rory Windhorst, who works at a business on Bourbon Street near the site of the attack. He noted that the city was pouring money into preparing for the Super Bowl in February, and he wondered whether there had been a “gross miscalculation” in how the resources were used.

The city released a statement Thursday saying it “is committed to ensuring the safety and functionality of Bourbon Street” and that the bollard replacement 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. 

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

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