SAVANNAH, Ga. () — Savannah city leaders held a special event briefing on Thursday to discuss the enhanced safety measures ahead of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

The Savannah Police Department (SPD) revealed new initiatives to keep the public safe.

“We recognize that there have been some things that have happened across the country that has our radar up,” Savannah Mayor Van Johnson said.

SPD said for years, trash trucks, garbage dump trucks and sanitation vehicles have blocked off streets during the parade event. However, following the recent tragedy in New Orleans, a new approach will be introduced this year: water barricades. Those barricades will be placed at the bottom of every ramp leading down to river street, ensuring no vehicles have access.

“They’ll be set up in a serpentine and then the gaps in them will be plugged with police vehicles to where a vehicle could not get through them,” Sgt. Jason Pagliaro, with the Savannah Police said. “But that still lets us move vehicles if we need to get a fire truck or an ambulance down there quickly and still allow access to the area. That also allows us to keep those in place from Friday at 4 p.m. until Tuesday morning when everything is over now.”

Those barricades will also block off City Market, Bryan and Congress Streets, and Franklin and Ellis Squares. However, council members expressed concerns about whether concrete barricades might be a stronger, better option.

“…concrete requires heavy equipment to place it and to move it,” Pagliaro said. “If I have to open a street up because we have a large fire, I can dump the water out of a water barricade and get it moved.”

He continued, “By doubling those up, we get the same effect we do with having one concrete.”

To execute a fun and safe weekend, SPD said the Georgia State Patrol and the Department of Public Safety’s nuclear detection team, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation bomb squad and National Guard units will all be heavily involved.

“GEMA sent down a team from their Homeland Security unit,” Pagliaro said. “They met with me and my staff at SPD, reviewed our operations and security plan cover to cover every bit of it, all 90 something pages of it.  Then we went out and walked the parade route from start to finish, as well as River Street and the City Market area.”

He added, “In addition to all of the units that we’re going to have down there, the Department of Public Safety, sent 100 troopers to assist with the parade. Chatham County sheriff has been gracious enough to send us 50 deputies to help us with the parade route as well, which is a significantly large increase over what we’ve done in years past.”

Pagliaro said they usually receive about 20 deputies to help each year.

“Department of Community Supervision is sending us 55 officers,” he said. “Twenty-five of them are special events certified and have extra training for dealing with crowds and events. Our amount of patrol will be out along with traffic, HEAT and GSP dealing with crowds and with DUIs.”

SPD’s new camera system will be up and running which will allow them to link to officer’s body cameras and cameras in the city. He said that this will help with response time when incidents do occur.

Since school will be in session the day of the parade, SPD told that they will keep roads open as long as possible before the parade begins. The last unit should clear staging around 3:30 p.m.

Crowds are anticipated to be the worst between Thursday, March 13 and Sunday, March 11.