New Orleans attack would’ve had ‘completely different outcome’ if steel barriers were used, inventor says
New Orleans attack would’ve had ‘completely different outcome’ if steel barriers were used, inventor says
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Peter Whitford says Archer barriers, which the city had stored away, have record of stopping vehicle rammings. The deadly New Year’s Day truck attack in New Orleans “would have had a completely different outcome” if city officials had put out 700lb (317kg) barriers that they bought years earlier and have a track record of preventing intentional vehicle rammings, the blockades’ inventor has told the Guardian.
![[Crane truck holding an Archer barrier drives through the street]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7f1b2ab9801d4872a96155cf5d29c975a08ac30b/0_100_3000_1800/master/3000.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
But the city “did not have a full slate of accessories to help move and deploy” those steel Archer barriers quickly in the way they were designed to be – and how authorities elsewhere have managed to do it, Peter Whitford, the chief executive officer of the Meridian Rapid Defense Group, said in an interview.
Though the Archers had stopped a relatively similar ramming attack in California exactly a year earlier, in New Orleans, officials came to regard them as too cumbersome to put out and pick back up, according to prior reporting from the Guardian. New Orleans emergency preparedness officials therefore stored them away. And they were one of three types of barriers meant to stop motorists from purposely targeting crowds that were missing in action on 1 January when an Islamic State (IS) terror group sympathizer fatally struck 14 people while injuring about 35 others on the city’s famous Bourbon Street.
Whitford late Thursday said the attack and subsequent revelations about why New Orleans chose not to set up its Archers had prompted him and other members of his defense company to travel to the city and personally handle furnishing its public safety establishment with the deployment equipment it evidently lacked.
