The New Orleans City Council this afternoon will be talking about the New Year's Day attack in the French Quarter, and if the city is on the right path to prevent this from happening again.
"Every piece of paper we pull, Newell, generates more questions," New Orleans City Council Vice President J.P. Morrell said to WWL's Newell Normand.
Morrell said he is struggling to understand why the city is replacing its physical barriers on Bourbon St. with something less sturdy that what they currently have.
"How a decision was made to replace the old barricades, that, though cumbersome, old, and difficult to manage; were actually capable of preventing attack, and replacing them with what are essentially are decorative go-cart bollards which every security professional has said would not have prevented this attack" is one of the things Morrell said the council will be looking into.
The city is in the middle of replacing the large metal Bourbon Street bollards that can stop a vehicle up to 15,000 pounds and moving at 40 miles an hour with smaller ones that are only rated up to a 5,000 pound vehicle, and moving a lot slower.
Morrell said they want to know who made that decision, and they want the receipts.
"Getting all the document production so that we're not speculating who made decisions but we see between documents and testimony, how these bad decisions were made," he said.
The current barricades were installed in 2017. Although they were designed to impede an attack like the one that happened on New Year's Day, the bollards had been removed while work continued on their replacement.
The tracks that allowed authorities to move the heavier older bollards into place would often fill with the debris associated with Bourbon St., making it difficult to deploy them.
The joint meetings of the council's Public Works and Criminal Justice committees starts at noon at New Orleans City Hall.
