NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans’ annual Carnival celebration entered its high-intensity home stretch Friday with a beefed-up police presence and a weather forecast that threatened to disrupt the first of two weekends of elaborate parades.
Three parades were scheduled to roll Friday night with no weather complications expected. But flood-threatening rains were in the forecast for today. City officials and organizers of six parades scheduled to roll today were changing start times in hopes of avoiding the deluges. Five parade step-off times were moved up, and another parade was rescheduled for Sunday.
“We can move some times back and forth. We will thread the needle with these parades,” Collin Arnold, the city’s homeland security director, said during a news conference earlier in the week.
In neighboring Jefferson Parish, the Mad Hatters parade also was moved from today to Sunday.