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Army-wide barracks inspection ordered

The Army’s senior leadership recently ordered a servicewide barracks inspection to make sure its billets are in better shape than the dilapidated quarters 82nd Airborne Division soldiers just came home to from Afghanistan, Army installation heads said Tuesday.

The impromptu walk-through carried out by all major commands occurred this past weekend in response to a video posted recently on YouTube that shows peeling paint, mold and a bathroom drain plugged with what appears to be sewage in the barracks that paratroopers from the Fort Bragg, N.C., unit were housed in after returning from a 15-month combat deployment.

“Folks, we let our soldiers down; that is not like us,” Brig. Gen. Dennis Rogers, the deputy director of Operations & Facilities of Army Installation Command, told reporters. “There is no good excuse for what happened.”

While the walk-through is not yet complete, Rogers said that garrison commanders have reported so far that “soldiers are being housed to the Army’s standard,” but stopped short of describing the poor barracks conditions some soldiers are living in at Fort Bragg as an isolated incident.

“I would hope that it is an isolated condition, and we will figure that out,” Rogers said. “If there are issues; we’ll fix them. That’s what we are going to do, we are going to fix them,” Rogers said. “We are still going through the data, and we will know by the end of the week.”

In addition to the walk-through, Army installation officials have stood up a Senior Non- Commissioned Officer Facilities Forum to make an assessment of Army barracks conditions. The forum, which will meet monthly, will be chaired by Command Sgt. Major Debra Strickland of Installation Management Command. It will inspect barracks and make recommendations for correcting current and future upkeep problems.

The video, shot by the father of Sgt. Jeff Frawley on April 14, caught the attention of Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R-N.C., on April 25. She said she contacted the Army secretary after learning of the barracks’ condition.

“Our service members deserve safe, clean housing,” she said. “If this video posting accurately portrays living conditions for our soldiers, this is wholly unacceptable and it must be immediately corrected.”

Army officials maintain, however, that most of the problems in that video were “corrected two weeks ago,” Rogers said.

“Soldiers are still living in this barracks because … the furniture in the barracks is brand new and the [air conditioning] and the heating systems are working,” he said. “The issues that have been identified, in large part, have been repaired.”

Currently, four of the 82nd Airborne’s six brigades are living in brand new barracks. The other two brigades, which include Frawley’s unit, are living in 1950s-era barracks that are scheduled to be demolished within five years. All soldiers — Army-wide — are scheduled to be in new barracks by 2012, Rogers said.

“Are soldiers happy with living in the Korean War barracks? No — especially when you are sitting right next door to the new, modern barracks,” said XVIII Airborne Corps and Fort Bragg spokesman Tom McCollum, who was on a conference call from Bragg.

Over the years, Bragg officials say they have worked to improve the older barracks, but McCollum admitted that “no matter how hard we try, we can’t put enough lipstick on this pig to make it look pretty.”

Watch:

Ed Frawley’s YouTube.com video

DISCUSS: Are you surprised?

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Let us know

Do you know of barracks or other soldiers’ facilities that are in bad shape — dirty, moldy or falling apart? Tell us about it. Send a message, with the word “barracks” in the message line, to armylet@atpco.com.

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Poor conditions at Bragg barracks exposed