More from the article ...

... Two weeks after 139 people died in raging Texas floods last summer, the leader of the Federal Emergency Management Agency ridiculed reporting that said the agency had missed thousands of calls to its emergency help center.

"Fake news," David Richardson, the acting administrator at the time, told House lawmakers who were probing officials' response to the flash flooding that killed more than two dozen children.

"The vast majority of phone calls were answered," Richardson said. "All calls were answered within three minutes."

Now, newly released FEMA records raise questions about the accuracy of his sworn testimony -- and whether the agency was able to provide timely disaster services during one of the nation's deadliest catastrophes. ...

Over nine days in early July, as flooding swamped Texas Hill Country, nearly 80,000 people called the toll-free FEMA Helpline, according to FEMA records disclosed for the first time in a recent Government Accountability Office report.

The agency failed to answer 58 percent of the calls. Callers who connected had to wait 25 minutes on average.

When call volume peaked from July 7 through July 9, FEMA failed to answer 78 percent of calls, records show. The average wait was 61 minutes.

Richardson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

FEMA did not answer questions about whether Richardson's testimony to Congress was inaccurate. ...