QP to set up a college for emergency and safety courses

The state-of-the-art college dedicated to emergency and safety courses at Ras Laffan Industrial City. The college, a venture of Qatar Petroleum (QP) and the Ministry of Interior (MoI), will be opened in November.

Qatar Petroleum (QP), in partnership with Qatar’s Ministry of Interior (MoI), will open a state-of-the-art college dedicated to emergency and safety courses at Ras Laffan Industrial City next month.

The Ras Laffan Emergency and Safety College (RLESC) will offer internationally-recognised as well as professional vocational qualifications courses and programmes in fire safety engineering and fire safety management.

A vision of HH the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the RLESC is a premier safety academy  spread over 100 hectares and equipped with modern classrooms, high-tech training props, and other support and administration facilities.

“The RLESC is designed to be one of the largest and most advanced education and training institutions in the region, serving not only companies and individuals in Qatar but also those in the greater Middle East, North Africa and Asia,” said RLESC manager Khalid Ahmed al-Ansari.

“The college is a testament of our resolve to become a hallmark of emergency safety training and its primary objective is to educate and train emergency and safety professionals to internationally-recognised qualification and standards in a variety of functional areas,” al-Ansari added.

These areas include the oil and gas sector, petrochemical industries, marine, civil aviation, civil defence, industrial fire fighting, emergency medical services, hazardous materials, search and rescue, health and safety, emergency response and driver training.

The RLESC offers a large selection of educational options comprising vocational training and academic programmes, as students can enrol in fire safety management or fire safety engineering diploma and degree courses.

Plans for the future include degrees in safety, environment, occupational health, business continuity, incident management and other related fields.

Applicants can enrol in single training courses on a specific field of study whose duration varies from three days to 12 weeks, or in academic degrees, which can extend from two to four years.

The first academic degrees will be available starting September 2014.

The college has a capacity to train up to 300 students at a time, and it uses English as the main medium of instruction, with Arabic translations also available for the courses and examinations.

The Texas Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) is the training provider of the RLESC. TEEX is internationally acclaimed in the area of advanced practical emergency and safety training.

In addition, all RLESC courses and degrees are accredited by the National Board on Fire Service Professional Qualifications (ProBoard) in the US.

RLESC also has the support of Texas A&M University at Qatar, which is the current research partner of the college in the field of liquefied natural gas (LNG).