The Saint Andrews Business Improvement Area (BIA) is hoping to make downtown festivals and events a little bit safer.
It applied for a grant to buy 52 water-filled barricades to block Water Street and the associated streets that lead onto it.
“More and more, over the past few years [globally], we’ve seen vehicles used to deliberately attack pedestrians and so with that in mind, the BIA, which is a local business organization, partnered with the Town of Saint Andrews to purchase these water-fillable barriers,” BIA secretary Katy MacDonald said.
It applied through Downtown NB– the Province of New Brunswick’s funding stream to support BIAs– and was successful. It will receive $20,000.
The BIA also asked the Town of Saint Andrews to match the funding.
In April, Kai-Ji Adam Lo was accused and charged for allegedly driving an SUV through a crowd of people during Vancouver’s Lapu-Lapu Day festival, killing 11 people and injuring dozens more.
On New Year’s Eve, a man drove a truck into a crowd of people in New Orleans – killing 14 people and injuring dozens more in what the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating as an act of terrorism.
MacDonald said it is hard to imagine something like this happening in Saint Andrews but this can give people peace of mind.
“These barriers act as a physical deterrent but also as a psychological deterrent to prevent any sort of tragic thing from happening,” she said in an interview with The Courier. “It could happen anywhere.”
She said this is one small proactive action the BIA can take. Ideally, MacDonald said the barricades will be available for Indulge– a food and wine festival that draws thousands of visitors to the town.
“We’ll probably never know if this will prevent something from happening, but we can live with that. What we can’t live with is something happening and knowing we didn’t take any proactive measures.”
Each barricade, when filled with water, is expected to weigh 1,100 pounds.
The council pulled $20,000 from the tourism accommodation levy– a fund contributed to by tourists who stay at the various BnBs, hotels and motels in town through a tax.
It unanimously supported the decision to help the BIA purchase the barricades.
