Families and victims of the New Year’s morning terrorist truck attack on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street have filed a negligence lawsuit in New Orleans state court, blaming city officials, engineer Mott MacDonald and a contractor of the dead.
The attacker, claiming allegiance to ISIS, killed 14 people and wounded many others.
At the time, the city’s Department of Public Works was in the middle of a local street reconstruction project that also involved “rReplacement of old bollards with new removable stainless steel bollards and repair of sidewalks in various locations.”
Mott MacDonald had acquired a local company in 2012 Lambert engineers, who already had won the contract to design street improvements.
The suit also named Hard Rock Construction Co. as a defendant. LLC, a heavy construction contractor based in Harvey, La.
Exactly what decisions were made are far from clear related to protecting the French Quarter and Bourbon Street from vehicles while the project was underway. Neither Mott MacDonald nor UK-based Hard Rock Construction could immediately be reached for comment.
The lawsuit cites an increase in the use of terrorist truck attacks in major cities since 2016 and cites a terror threat report prepared for the city by AECOM. This report noted that “the French Quarter is often crowded with pedestrians and represents an area where a mass casualty incident could occur.”
During the multi-phase street reconstruction project, Mott MacDonald failed to advise city officials to protect the street with bollards or barriers capable of stopping a Ford F-150 like the one used in the attack, according to the lawsuit. The suit also accuses Hard Rock Construction of failing to temporarily secure an area of the French Quarter where it had begun work with vehicle-resistant bollards or barriers.
Mott MacDonald has in the past specified one type of mobile bollard system for some streets, the plaintiffs claim, but then selected a less expensive and less effective product that could withstand a vehicle moving at more than 12 mph.
As with many negligence lawsuits, the claims against Mott MacDonald say city officials, also named as defendants, reasonably relied on their engineering consultant as an expert on the job. But the lawsuit doesn’t say how much influence city officials had in decisions about street safety, the sequence of work, and why they didn’t use other heavy street bollards already in the city’s possession, and mentioned in the lawsuit, in this part from Carrer Bourbon this last end of the year.
