FEMA failed to answer "nearly half" of all the phone calls

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Is anyone else surprised by this?

No?

Hundreds of thousands of people who are trying to recover from disasters nationwide have been unable to get through to federal call centers or have stayed on hold for excessive periods of time in the weeks since Helene barreled into southern Appalachia last month.

Overwhelmed by Helene and Hurricane Milton, the centers failed to answer nearly half of the incoming phone calls over the course of one week recently. For the calls that were answered, it took more than an hour for federal workers to pick up, on average.

Live feed of FEMA’s federal call center:

It’s starting to make sense why so many Americans in Appalachia have been suffering for so long now:

Don’t worry, though, the federal government is totally prepared for what comes next:

FEMA data shows that the agency has almost no capacity to deal with another major disaster — two weeks after the Small Business Administration ran out of money to provide low-interest disaster loans for small businesses and households.

It’s almost as if our government is run by horrifically incompetent bureaucrats who have no idea how to manage anything, let alone a major natural disaster!

In all fairness, a large part of the problem seems to be horrible staffing numbers:

The FEMA Daily Operations Briefing also showed that it was responding to 110 major disasters on Tuesday and had just 530 workers available for a new assignment. (The number was 504 on Wednesday.) Every one of FEMA’s 55 federal coordinating officers, who directly oversee disasters, was ‘assigned’ or ‘unavailable.’

On FEMA’s busiest day after Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria – Sept. 23, 2017 – the agency had 1,752 workers available.

2017 was 7 years ago in the first term of President Donald Trump. There’s no reason the agency couldn’t have replaced any decline in numbers since then. Acting as if this is just some nebulous, unmanageable problem of workers is, to say the least, disingenuous.