As New Orleans authorities respond to a mass killing early this morning in the city's French Quarter, News 12 is hearing from a security expert in the Hudson Valley.

He has a lot of questions about how someone was able plow through a crowd with a truck on the busiest party night of the year, and he hopes departments nationwide can learn something from this.

The initial call, just after 3 a.m. Sunday, was for a "mass casualty incident" and a vehicle that ran into a crowd of people," according to scanner traffic shared online.

Experts are now trying to make sense of the attack on the iconic Bourbon Street, a street often closed to vehicle traffic for weekend and holiday events.

Police said the suspect drove through a crowd, killing ten people and injuring about 30 others, shooting two police officers, and then dying in a shootout.

The FBI is investigating the attack as an act of terrorism.

The agency said that at least one improvised explosive device was found in the suspect's car.

The wounded officers are in stable condition, police said.

"We've seen these types of attacks," security consultant Sal Lifrieri, of Protective Countermeasures Inc, said in a Zoom interview a few hours following the incident.

When he first learned about the attack, Lifrieri's first thought was about how well police blocked Bourbon Street from vehicles.

"The review has to be about how the vehicle got past these checkpoints and these particular block-offs and what was deployed?," Lifrieri said.

He said that since the 1990s, New York City area police have used concrete barriers and large city sanitation trucks to seal of areas like Times Square from drivers.

Some people on scene following the Bourbon Street attack said car traffic did not seem well controlled.

"There was still -- at midnight, one in the morning — there was still cars driving by even though there was people walking all over the street," said Jose Lieras, a tourist from California.

Lifrieri said the unpleasant truth is that when an attacker is willing to fight until death, it is difficult for police to protect against.

"They understand that these attacks that they're conducting, they want to die," Lifrieri said in a matter-of-fact manner. "So it's either they kill you or you kill them and there is no surrender to it."

Lifrieri looks forward to seeing a full investigative report on New Orleans police's preparation and response.

He said departments nationwide are likely to adjust their own procedures based on that report.

Stay with News 12 for developments in this story.