HM Coastguard celebrates 200th birthday
The organisation was founded in 1822
HM Coastguard turns 200 years old today.
It will be marked at 11am by teams all around the coast performing a ceremonial throw line (a rescue technique) into the sea to demonstrate the organisation's purpose - saving lives.
The Coastguard is one of the UK’s four frontline emergency services, operating a 24/7, 365 day a year, providing a search and rescue service to save lives at the coast and at sea.
In 2020 it responded to over 33,000 incidents.
It was initially a small group, set up to prevent smuggling but now there are an estimated 310 Coastguard Rescue Teams, consisting of around 3000 volunteers, and 10 search and rescue helicopters.
Phil Norman, an Coastal Area Operations Commander, has been working for the Coastguard for 32 years,
He says it's an honour to do his job:
"I'm immensely proud to work for an organisation whose sole focus is making the best of somebody's bad day. We do save lives, we do do our preventative work, we're out there selling the safety message. An immense amount of satisfaction comes from... knowing we make a difference to people."
"I've obviously done a significant number of callouts over the years and that's one of the things that gives job satisfaction - knowing... that people are sat round dinner tables because of the difference that the teams, of which I'm a part of, have done through callouts."
He also says the Coastguard has big things planned for the future.
"We plan to continue to grow, modernising our services as we go, keeping pace with constantly upgrading technology to see how we can best utilise it to assist in our mission of saving lives and be at the kind of forefront of the innovation... for the next 200 years or so."