Numbers Question: WSJ Editorial and Job Corps Students Fighting Fires

Reflecting their solid training and professionalism, Pine Knot Job Corps Civilian Conservation Students (JCCCC) students worked 13,129 hours on 40 assignments during the 2016 fire season.

I don’t know how many of you saw this editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

You’d think all of this would be reason enough to shut down more centers. But if the Administration had proceeded as planned, some 1,065 Forest Service employees might have lost their jobs. Commence the lobbying. Randy Erwin, their union president, slammed the Administration for “a coordinated attack on the most vulnerable populations in this country: Rural and urban low-income young people hoping to succeed in life.”

On June 5 a bipartisan group of 51 lawmakers signed a letter expressing “strong opposition” to closing the centers. They warned that it was “precisely the wrong time” to cut the centers “after a difficult year of natural disasters and with hurricane and wildfire season quickly approaching.” But fewer than 150 of the 30,000 students served by the Forest Service Job Corps centers train to fight fires. Others sometimes support disaster-response efforts, but the central mission of Jobs Corps is to launch students toward steadier work.

(My bold)
I was curious. Given the locations of the Job Corps centers, I would have thought that more than 150 are trained to fight fires. So I looked online and found this. Job Corps

Participation in CY 2017
Approx. 1200 students deployed to nearly 200 wildfire assignments with over 450,000 hours of support.
Boxelder Mobile Kitchen Unit mobilized within R2.

Or this from Wildfire Today.

It shows that combined, they provided help on 412 assignments involving 1,971 participant assignments (many had more than one), for a total of 368,998 hours.

Does anyone know where we could get an accurate number for firefighting and support for 2018, and then, perhaps, we can send it to the WSJ editorial board?

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