THE Philippine Coast Guard will hire 1,000 new personnel to be deployed in the maritime hubs of the Visayas and Mindanao, particularly Cebu and Cagayan de Oro.

Commandant Vice Adm. Wilfredo Tamayo said the additional men will be a welcome boost to the current 5,000 personnel of the Coast Guard.

?[But] the Coast Guard needs more people because we are an archipelagic country with more than 7,000 islands,? said Tamayo.

Even if the agency would deploy one personnel for every island there would still be ?a lot of unguarded islands.?

The Coast Guard operates through five area commands, 64 districts and 192 detachments nationwide. The agency assigns between three to five personnel for every detachment.

?I have been saying that the Coast Guard is one of the over-challenged coast guards in the world. We wish we could raise our number of personnel to 25,000 so there would be more detachments that would be put up, so there would be more areas that we could cover, the more we could protect, and the more coastlines we could service,? said Tamayo.

It would take about 10 years for the agency to be able to hire 10,000 more recruits. Joel E. Zurbano