Vehicle plows into crowd on Bourbon St., with 14 fatalities

St. Widge said
Maybe, but the explanation given (I think by the Mayor or maybe the Police Chief) was that they were being worked on to get them ready for the Super Bowl. It sounded like they had not worked correctly for awhile, or were at least difficult to get up and down, and they were now fixing them in preparation for the Super Bowl. But it's hard to know if they were actually functional or not when they took them down for maintenance.

It was a project to replace many or all of them. Chances are some of them worked to various degrees and some did not. We can probably assume the Bourbon ones did not since a police vehicle was parked in the intersection, but it's kind of immaterial at this point.