New Orleans was partway through replacing its street barriers, leaving a fatal opening

• A driver killed 15 in a vehicle-ramming attack in New Orleans on New Year's Day.
• Bollards were installed in 2017 to limit vehicle access, but soon after began malfunctioning.
• They were being replaced over New Year's. Police had a makeshift barricade that the attacker drove around.

New Orleans was removing and replacing traffic bollards around the site of the mass killing there on New Year's Day.

Instead, police officers had installed a makeshift barricade which the attacker was able to drive around, going on to kill 15 people.

The suspect, identified as 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was driving a rented Ford pickup, which struck people celebrating on Bourbon Street at about 3.15 a.m.

Video footage from just before the attack showed the vehicle turning right off Canal Street and onto Bourbon Street, swerving around a police car partially blocking the street.

"This particular terrorist drove around onto the sidewalk and got around the hard target," said New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick at a press conference Wednesday.

"We did have a car there, we had barriers there, we had officers there, and they still got around," she said. "We did indeed have a plan, but the terrorist defeated it."

A part-finished project

According to Reuters, bollards were installed at intersections in New Orleans' French Quarter in 2017, ahead of an NBA All-Stars game.

When they were placed around Bourbon Street in December 2017, NOLA.com reported that they were part of a $40 million safety plan to block intersections during special events.

A 2017 report commissioned by New Orleans and reviewed by Reuters warned that the French Quarter was an area "where a mass casualty incident could occur."

It followed a 2016 vehicle-ramming attack in Nice, France, where a truck drove into a crowd on a national holiday, Bastille Day, and killed 86 people.

In the years since, attacks in Sweden, Spain, the UK, and the United States prompted the spread of street barriers in major cities, designed to protect against vehicle attacks.

At the time of Wednesday's attack, Bourbon Street was partway through a New Orleans' Bollard Assessment and Replacement Project, which started in mid-November 2024.

It was scheduled to be completed in February 2025.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell confirmed that "bollards were not up because they are near completion, with the expectation of being completed, of course, by Super Bowl,"

The Super Bowl will be held on February 9 at Caesars Superdome, a little over a mile away from Bourbon Street. The finish date is also a little ahead of Mardi Gras, New Orleans' most famous celebration.

Cantrell said the original bollards had started to malfunction soon after being installed, and were prone to being clogged by Mardi Gras beads. The police deemed them "inefficient," hence the replacements, she said.

The city said the scope of the work involved "replacing old bollards with new removable stainless-steel bollards."

One eyewitness, Jimmy Cothran, told NBC News that he was surprised not to see metal street barriers up this year.

He said, "They weren't up, so you still kind of had to watch your back for cars."

An engineer who worked on the bollard project, speaking to NBC News on the condition of anonymity, said there was "a mad dash to rush this job" in time for the Super Bowl.

They said that when the original bollards were being installed, hydraulic roadblocks were added during construction to protect pedestrians, but this time there were lesser measures like orange traffic drums.

Video footage also showed a police cruiser partially blocking the entrance to the street.

New Orleans City Council President Helena Moreno told WWL-TV that she thought the bollards should have been done earlier. She also said she wasn't sure if they would have prevented the deaths.

"This person was ready to inflict pain and death and harm on crowds in Bourbon Street, and I think he would have tried to find whatever way that he could," she said.