New Orleans plans to protect large sections of its Mardi Gras parade routes with mobile 700lb steel barriers that are designed to prevent intentional vehicle rammings – but were not deployed on the night that the city endured the deadly Bourbon Street truck attack at the beginning of the year, according to the blockades’ manufacturer.
The former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration had acquired an initial inventory of Archer barriers – certified by the US’s homeland security department under a congressional act incentivizing anti-terrorism technology – in 2017 in response to deadly car rammings aimed at crowds in Nice, Berlin, London, New York and Barcelona.
Barriers that Meridian provided to the city to supplement its initial stash were seen in place along Bourbon Street and throughout the surrounding French Quarter – including at the city’s St Louis cathedral, where light shows were projected on the building’s exterior.
But, in an interview on New Orleans’s WWL Radio in January, Meridian’s CEO, Peter Whitford, said it would take the city renting an additional 900 barriers to protect the parade route.
But as a crowd of revelers descended on New Orleans’s globally renowned Bourbon Street to ring in 2025 on the morning of 1 January, the administration of Landrieu’s successor – Mayor LaToya Cantrell – had chosen to leave its Archer barriers in storage.
