Officials at Fort Hood in Texas have shut down a dining facility at the base indefinitely after a video on social media showed a roach problem in its kitchen.
The video was posted online by social media pages called “U.S Army W.T.F! Moments” and depicts roaches on the walls and surfaces of a kitchen in the Operation Iraqi Freedom dining facility at Fort Hood.
The video was accompanied by anonymous testimony, purportedly from a worker at the dining facility, saying that “we currently have an ongoing roach problem. But the higher ups won’t shut down the building to bomb the building. They expect us to work when the walls are literally covered in roaches which is something that shouldn’t be happening. In the real world this place would have been shut down by the health inspectors.”
Officials at Fort Hood, which is located 121 miles southwest of Dallas and is the base for the III Armored Corps, confirmed the issue and that the facility would be closed while the roach problem was resolved.
In a statement reposted by the social media account that was also provided to ABC News, III Armored Corps spokesperson Lt. Col. Joseph Payton said that “we are aware of the video depicting our dining facility. Effective immediately, we are closing the Operation Iraqi Freedom facility to correct the situation. The DFAC will remain closed until the problem is remediated.”
“While the facility is closed, we are shifting foodservice personnel to other dining facilities, and we are additionally providing onsite food trucks,” he continued.
Lt. Col. Payton also said officials are investigating how the roach problem arose.
Fort Hood put out a separate social media notice that food service operations would be switched from the shuttered dining facility to a different building, effective from Thursday through Sunday. The building being put in use, Fort Hood officials said, will only offer takeout.
Robert Evans, the creator of an app called Hots and Cots that rates barracks and dining facilities on military installations, told military newspaper Stars and Stripes that “our reviews show the same conditions turning up across other installations and across other services. In every case the soldier eating there could see it before any official system did.”
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