NEW ORLEANS — As New Orleans prepares to reopen Bourbon Street to the public in the wake of the deadly New Year’s Day pickup truck attack, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said there would be an “unprecedented” law enforcement presence before the Allstate Sugar Bowl on Thursday.
At a news conference Thursday, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the city would reopen Bourbon Street to the public at 3:30 p.m. ET Thursday, a half hour before No. 2 Georgia and No. 7 Notre Dame are scheduled to play in a College Football Playoff quarterfinal game at the Sugar Bowl.
The Sugar Bowl was originally scheduled to be played Wednesday night, but the game was pushed back a day after a deadly pickup truck attack on Bourbon Street left 15 people dead, including the driver, and injured dozens more.
The FBI said Thursday that it believes the driver of a truck that drove around a police barricade and rammed into a crowd of people on Bourbon Street in the early-morning hours of New Year’s Day acted alone.
“I want to [assure] people that right now in the city of New Orleans, there’s an unprecedented amount of law enforcement resources that are being utilized to close out and to hunt down and finalize this investigation,” Landry said.
Landry said members of the Louisiana National Guard, as well as correctional officers and members of other state law enforcement divisions have been deployed to the city to help with security.
In an interview on “Today” on Thursday, New Orleans police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said the city would have as much security in place for the Sugar Bowl as it was planning to use for next month’s Super Bowl.
“We are in partnership with many other partners,” Kirkpatrick said. “Both local, federal, military police, and so forth, will be here, and so we’re going to have absolutely hundreds of officers and staff lining our streets, lining Bourbon Street, lining the French Quarter. So, we are staffing up at the same level, if not more so, than we were preparing for [the] Super Bowl.”
Numerous security officers around the 70,000-seat stadium Thursday were handling dogs trained to sniff for explosive devices. They encircled cars entering the Superdome parking garage and, in some cases, sniffed bags and backpacks.
Christopher Raia, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s…
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