The security posts, known as bollards, were not in place before a suspect drove a truck into a crowd in New Orleans’ French Quarter early on New Year’s Day, killing 14 and injuring at least 35.
Louisiana officials said the street barriers were out of order and were being renovated before the city hosts the NFL Super Bowl on Feb. 9.
Short and sturdy bollards – made of concrete, metal or other materials – are intended to prevent cars from entering pedestrian areas.
Christopher Raia, deputy assistant director of the FBI, called the attack an act of terrorism on Thursday.
During the early hours of New Year’s Day, a police vehicle was parked at the intersection to block access to Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, where the attack occurred, but the suspect drove around the car and onto the sidewalk, police said.
Police have named Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old Texas resident and US Army veteran, as the suspect. He died in the attack.
New Orleans Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick said Wednesday that police were “aware of the bollard situation” and had taken steps to “harden those targeted areas.”
“We really had a plan, but the terrorist defeated it,” she said.
Ms. Kirkpatrick said the city plans to take a number of steps to increase security at the Sugar Bowl, which was moved from Wednesday to Thursday afternoon because of the attack.
Bourbon Street will reopen on Thursday just before the game.
“We have re-enforced the area,” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said Thursday.
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New Orleans began installing bollards on Bourbon Street more than a decade ago, Mayor LaToya Cantrell said Wednesday.
But, she added, the cleats began to fail due to blockage from Mardi Gras balls, prompting officials to try to replace them before the Super Bowl, which is scheduled to be held at Caesars Superdome, near the site of the attack.
At the press conference, Ms. Kirkpatrick defended other safety measures the city has put in place.
“We had a car there, we had barriers there, we had police officers there, and they were still going around,” she said.
Numerous cities in the US and around the world have installed bollards to prevent attacks.
New York City implemented safety measures along the Hudson River Park bike path after a man drove a rental pickup truck into cyclists and runners along the path in 2017, killing eight people.
It’s too hard to say with certainty whether the posts in New Orleans would have prevented such an incident, said University of Michigan professor and counterterrorism expert Javed Ali.
“He had a Ford 150 pickup truck. Let that thing go 50, 60 miles an hour, and who knows, even with the poles in place, would the car just — through physics — still plow through them?” he said.
“It must have been a lot of luck,” Ali added. “That’s unfortunately what happens in these types of attacks.”
A 2017 report commissioned by the city of New Orleans found the French Quarter to be a “terrorist risk and target area identified by the FBI as a concern the city must address.”
The report said the neighborhood “is often densely populated with pedestrians and is an area where mass accidents could occur.”
