TODAY marks the end of an era in Dorset’s long and proud maritime history.

Portland Coastguard’s harbourside station starts shifting operations to Hampshire and will be complete by the end of the week.

From today, the National Maritime Operation Centre will be taking over responsibility from Portland coastguard station, a spokesman for the Maritime and Coastguard Agency said.

He added: “Operations are planned to have completely transitioned by the end of Thursday or early Friday this week.”

At the NMOC at Fareham last week, Coastguard bosses said that services would not suffer as a result of loss of local knowledge.

Concerns had been raised that it will take longer to co-ordinate rescues due to operators’ lack of local knowledge and could mean a loss of lives.

But bosses said they were confident fears could be allayed and that a reliance on local knowledge has, in the past, resulted in ‘less than brilliant’ outcomes.

Five staff will be moving from Portland to the new centre and will make up part of the 96-man team, which will be based at the NMOC by 2015 when it becomes fully operational.

The NMOC will run on two generators that both have twice the power required in case either malfunctions, and telecommunications run on two routes for the same reason.

There are also batteries available, able to keep the building running for a month, in the event of a power shutdown. Coastguard bosses said the building had a ‘resilience that we have never had anywhere before’.

Tests and drills have been going on at the new NMOC for eight months.

Speaking about the exercises in the run-up to the takeover, a spokesman for the MCA said: “HM Coastguard’s testing programme at the National Maritime Operations Centre is proving the functionality, validity and stability of core operational systems and procedures.

“It is utilising exercises from HM Coastguard’s National Exercise Catalogue, starting with low-level complexity incidents and progressively moving to concurrent high-level complexity incidents, with business-as-usual activity on top.”

He added: “The exercises chosen ensure that all functionality required by a coastguard in the course of their duties at low, medium and high levels of workload is thoroughly tested.

“We have undertaken live exercises with lifeboats and Coastguard Rescue Teams which were very successful in trialling the operational systems and procedures in a live environment.”