How New Orleans failed to protect Bourbon Street from attack, block by block

Major security lapses preceded the vehicular-ramming attack that left 14 dead, according to a Post examination of visual evidence and accounts from witnesses.

As New Orleans officials deployed to protect thousands of revelers they knew would flock to the city’s famed French Quarter on New Year’s Eve, they parked a police SUV to block the main entrance to Bourbon Street, a packed pedestrian thoroughfare long seen as vulnerable to a vehicular-ramming attack.

But the SUV left a large gap. That allowed the driver of a pickup truck to turn onto Bourbon Street hours after midnight, video shows, in the first moments of a deadly Islamic State-inspired rampage. It was not a momentary security lapse: At various times earlier that evening, the gap between the police SUV and the nearest structural obstacle was more than twice the width of the attacker’s truck, a Washington Post examination of visual evidence found.

A short distance down the block, the truck drove over a hydraulic metal barrier that officials had planned to raise that night to prevent unauthorized vehicles from driving down Bourbon Street, according to a New Year’s Eve road closure plan obtained by The Post. The barrier was left down.

Beyond that point, there were no anti-vehicle barricades or police vehicles blocking the path of the truck that night, according to eyewitnesses and video footage reviewed by The Post. The driver sped virtually unimpeded for almost 1,000 feet, plowing through a crowd of people until he struck a piece of construction equipment that happened to be there for a project unrelated to security, according to photographs, videos and witness accounts.

Police have previously acknowledged that the driver managed to bypass security safeguards that had been put in place — with one official saying they had a plan and yet “the terrorist defeated it.”

But The Post’s block-by-block accounting of events on New Year’s Eve and into the next morning found major security lapses and shortcomings in the city’s street-closure plan. Among the findings, the hydraulic metal barricade that was not raised was the only anti-vehicle barrier planned on Bourbon Street itself.

There were a number of ways to successfully protect this street from a ramming attack, and it appears that none of them were used,” security expert Don Aviv said after reviewing The Post’s findings. Aviv is chief executive of Interfor International, a company commissioned by the French Quarter Management District to study security measures in the area in 2019.

The FBI had warned New Orleans officials years earlier that Bourbon Street was vulnerable. The mayor at the time pushed to bolster public-safety infrastructure after a deadly 2016 vehicle-ramming attack in Nice, France, that helped prompt cities around the world to rethink their security.

The following year, parts of the stretch where the New Year’s attack would occur were among several blocks specified in a city report as areas in need of hardened infrastructure to reduce the risk of terrorists using vehicles to ram pedestrians.

The 2017 report, commissioned by the city’s Public Works Department, noted that “portable police barricades” often used to close the street to most vehicles on evenings and holidays and for special events provided “a low level of security” because they were easy for people to move aside.

“Would be vehicle borne attackers could just as easily move — or drive straight through — these barricades,” the report said.

That year, officials announced a $40 million public safety project that included the installation of metal posts known as bollards that could slide on tracks into the middle of Bourbon Street to temporarily block vehicles at critical points near each cross street. However, Mardi Gras beads and other debris jammed the mechanisms, rendering the system unusable, officials said.

The approach to closing Bourbon Street has always been inconsistent, local residents and workers said, and Interfor International’s 2019 report found that security in the French Quarter was handled in a “patchwork manner” and hindered by “improper or insufficient coordination, cohesion and proper deployment.”

Security vulnerabilities were on display on Halloween last year when, according to the FBI, the Texas man who would later attack Bourbon Street visited New Orleans and recorded video as he biked through the French Quarter. Later that evening, as partyers crowded the area, no police vehicles or significant barriers were blocking the entrance onto Bourbon Street from Canal Street, according to video footage posted by one local YouTuber. The old bollards appeared battered and weren’t used.