New Orleans launches public safety app, just in time for the Super Bowl
This Sunday, New Orleans will host its 11th Super Bowl, between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles, tying it with Miami for the most Super Bowls ever hosted by a single city.
In preparation for the sporting event, last week the city’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness launched its new NOLA Ready Public Safety App, aimed at helping city officials and the public stay informed and prepared for large events, such as this year’s Super Bowl, and city emergencies, like severe weather.
The free app provides real-time updates, such as road closures, traffic accidents, inclement weather and power outages, using an interactive map and information from city websites. Users can also report emergencies or suspicious activity through its incident reporting feature, alerting local, state and federal authorities.
Collin Arnold, director of the Homeland Security Office, said those planning to attend major events in New Orleans, including the Super Bowl, Mardi Gras, and other large gatherings, are encouraged to download the app.
“We’re a city that we pride ourselves on being built to host, we do 250 to 350 major special events a year,” Arnold told StateScoop in an interview. “Being that this is one of the largest special events in the world, we thought this would be a good place for us to kind of debut [the app].”
Arnold said the app pulls information from the city’s public works, police department, sewage and water board, and electric utility. He said he hopes to expand the app’s offerings to include more features, like a 311 function and postings of volunteer opportunities during emergencies.
“My goal with this is that it’s something that people will actually use and not something you download on your phone once for one event, and then it gets buried somewhere deep within your device and you you never see it again,” Arnold said.
Arnold said the city developed the app partially because the city’s risk for hurricanes and other destructive weather events often require residents to seek out important, sometimes life-saving, information that’s distributed across city websites.
“The idea was to kind of bring an app together that would combine disparate areas of information that are out there already, but that people have to search around and find [on] different websites,” Arnold said. “The ability to pull that up in one location is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while.”
Arnold said the app was also motivated by the attack on Jan. 1, in which a man drove a pickup truck into a crowd of people on Bourbon Street, killing 14 and injuring dozens more.
“The events around January 1 and the attack here in the French Quarter also made it clear that we want to do more with our special event safety,” he said.
Arnold said the new app is loosely modeled off the city’s event tracker app, Routewise, which tracks parades and its accompanying activities throughout the city.
“It allows people to look at real time where the parades are,” Arnold explained. “It allows them to look at where services are around those parades — like restrooms, food vendors lost child areas, and public safety areas together in one place.”
Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security’s newly confirmed secretary visited the Big Easy to observe security operations, according to a Tuesday press release from the federal agency.
“Around 100,000 people will be celebrating the Super Bowl in and around the Super Dome in New Orleans this weekend,” Noem said in the release. “We will give law enforcement every resource they need to ensure a safe event.”
President Trump is reportedly planning to attend the Super Bowl as well, according to CBS.
