It is; it’s late in the 4th quarter. The Rose Bowl is supposed to start at the top of the hour, and, as far as I can tell, is still going to be played as planned.
That’s just bizarre. I’d have more respect for them if they just admitted that they didn’t think something like that could happen in their city and hadn’t prepared.
And it’s not as if building bollards to protect the sidewalk and parking official vehicles to block the street are exotic new technology. Bollards went up all over the city i used to work in shortly after 9/11.
It’s even more bizarre because New Orleans should be experts at crowd control and safety. The French Quarter/Bourbon Street is never not busy, and they hold massive annual events like Mardi Gras where it’s so busy you can hardly move.
It is my understanding that these bollards are automated. Bollards & Vehicle Barriers
They were being repaired as they did not work properly and the concern was that they would “stick”, stopping response to an emergency.
While they were being repaired/replaced police cars were deployed as barriers.
The bollards were timed for the nfl bowl game next month, not the college bowl game today.
That seems weirdly high-tech and prone to failure. Simple permanent bollards protecting the sidewalk from the street, with some well-parked cars and trucks to block the street itself during events like parades, seems much more robust, and probably cheaper.
Yep, the more parts to break, the more they will break.
CNN is now reporting that the 4 people on the video have been cleared and not involved in the explosive devices. FBI is still thinking there are others involved.
Reports from cnn is that the driver was in financial distress.16-24k in debt and looking at foreclosure.
Possibly related?
There has been a large increase over the past few years in the SF Bay area, in the number of stolen vehicles used to crash into the fronts of stores or bars or restaurants to steal whatever they can lay their hands on, and flee (always wearing hoodies and masks, of course). No-one seems to be thinking of bollards as a universal solution to this. News coverage does not mention the possibility. I am still puzzled as to why not.
(sorry for something of a hijack, although it is related to the subjects of vehicles being used to commit crimes, and bollards to help prevent it)
The guy lived in Houston. FBI and local Swat currently searching his house.
You don’t need anything “permanent” or expensive: just drop a few concrete roadblocks where needed
and remove them when the parade is over.
You want to put those on… The sidewalk??!?!?!!?
Nevermind
I’ve been in NOLA for NYE for the past three years and five of the last six years. (It’s also our anniversary and we got married there.) And we always spend that night wandering around the Quarter.
The only reason we didn’t go this year is that I have a work trip there coming up soon.
I don’t know how you prevent this, either in general or specifically in the FQ. The Quarter is a living neighborhood and you can’t block traffic to it completely. There is always going to be a crowd somewhere around there that you could get a vehicle to if you really wanted to.
You need something that will stop a speeding truck, right? (We are talking temporary barriers here; permanent bollards can of course be anchored. There are also camouflaged bollards.) People can walk around them. You correctly point out that it takes up width, possibly enough to create a bottleneck if not well placed.
Sorry, maybe my sarcasm was not obvious enough.
I agree with you, of course. Concrete blocks would have worked perfectly.
The issue is that New Orleanshad something else that would also have worked perfectly well - parked squad cars - but they were too dumb to put them on the sidewalk, and at the press conference seemed dunmbfounded that anyone would have considered driving over the sidewalk to get around the squad cars.
So if they had big concrete blocks, they might have put them on the road instead of the squad cars; but they’d still have left the sidewalks clear for any passing terrorists, because the idea of blocking the sidewalks doesn’t seem to have occurred to them.
The public still needs a place to walk. You can put up a cordon of cars, trucks, M1 tanks, or whatever you want. it still has to be porous enough to allow a crowd of 50 to 100K people to walk past it. That implies many pretty big gaps.
So, there are two ways of temporarily blocking off a street. One is to remind clueless drivers that the street will be closed today. My little town has a couple of annual parades, and the streets are closed. But it’s not meant to be a security thing. They often use lightweight wooden horses with signs that say, “street closed” at some of the intersections. You could probably drive over those with a big consumer truck. You can certainly drive around them if you don’t mind going onto the sidewalk. The other is to actually physically prevent cars from getting by. That requires a much heavier barrier, and narrower gaps between the barriers.
It sounds like maybe New Orleans did the first, but doesn’t want to admit that for whatever reason.
The basic problem is that a driver intent on mayhem can ALWAYS find an unprotected crowd. Bollards, concrete blocks, parked emergency vehicles can try to protect the big events, but someone willing to sacrifice their life to harm others is hard to prevent.
I think any solution would be politics and therefore inappropriate for this thread (not that I have one), but assuming the French Quarter were fully sealed off, I’m willing to bet that the driver could have killed and injured a similar number of victims somewhere else in the city in the wee hours of New Year’s.
I typed a long response, and decided it doesn’t belong here. 