About Northshore | Jordan Larne, Control of Work Specialist
About Northshore

Jordan Larne

Control of Work Specialist

BEngNEBOSHPTWLOTOConfined SpaceCOMAHSIMOPS
10+
Years of frontline PTW experience
Top-tier
COMAH-regulated site
Full
Permit lifecycle, issuer to manager

Background and experience

Northshore Safety Services provides independent operational reviews of permit-to-work systems and warehouse safety controls in high-hazard industrial environments. The work is led by Jordan Larne.

That experience is grounded in ten years at a top-tier COMAH-regulated pharmaceutical manufacturing site, with permit activity running simultaneously across:

  • Multiple process plants
  • Hazardous chemical systems
  • Steam and utilities infrastructure
  • Fermentation facilities
  • A CHP plant
  1. Now · High-hazard industrial operations

    Global EHS Specialist

    Supports high-hazard industrial operations across multiple territories. Experience in incident management, operational safety training and work control system review.

  2. Top-tier COMAH pharmaceutical site

    Operations and Utilities Manager / Site SME, Permit-to-Work

    Managed permit systems under production pressure while serving as subject matter expert for all permit-related activity across the site. Direct experience of the pressure that production timelines and operational complexity place on permit systems, seen from the management side as well as the permit desk.

  3. Pharmaceutical manufacturing

    High-Volume Permit Issuer

    Ten years issuing permits across all work categories and the full permit lifecycle, and supporting major projects including new plant builds, commissioning and decommissioning.

High-volume issuing experience, project and shutdown management, ALARP assessment and operational management accountability: together they give a view of how permit systems behave under the full range of conditions they actually face.

Warehouse and logistics experience

19
warehouse sites
4
continents

Jordan has worked on a global warehouse audit and improvement programme covering 19 sites across four continents, raising the overall safety picture and standardising how it is assessed so that standards are applied consistently. That experience informs the Warehouse Safety Exposure Review.

Northshore operates independently of Jordan’s employed role, providing independent reviews for organisations that want an honest operational assessment of their safety systems.

Where the practical knowledge came from

Real operational situations from permit issuing and area management. They show what this kind of review experience looks like more clearly than any service description.

When the paperwork said safe and the atmosphere did not

Walkdown and testing

A cleaning crew was preparing to work on the external surfaces of a blender. The permit process had been followed. There was no obvious external sign of danger. Management pressure to progress the job was present throughout.

During the walkdown before issuing, the smell coming from the blender indicated something that did not match the assumption that conditions were acceptable. Atmosphere testing at the hatches showed oxygen levels below a safe working limit.

The job was stopped. An extraction system was installed. Atmosphere levels were monitored until safe conditions were confirmed. Work then proceeded with each operative wearing personal oxygen monitors throughout.

Nothing in the permit documentation would have caught that. The walkdown caught it. The decision to test rather than proceed caught it. That is the difference between a system that controls work and a system that records it.

When the isolation was signed off but the energy was still present

Isolation integrity

A technician was preparing to work on a flocculant system. Electrical power had been successfully locked out. The LOTO checklist had a signature confirming that lines had been drained and flushed. They had not been.

When a triclamp was loosened to test a flowmeter, residual trapped pressure sent a blank shooting off the fitting. The technician was covered in flocculant. A near-miss to the face, an immediate environmental hazard, and a system that had passed every documentary check.

The investigation identified the gap between what was recorded and what had physically been done. It led directly to the introduction of pre-approved isolation blocks: isolations designed in advance with expert process safety input, drain valves specified as locked open and documented, sheets paired with the maintenance work ticket to manage the full strip and rebuild sequence.

The system stopped relying on in-the-moment decisions made under operational pressure.

When two legitimate activities created a hazard neither of them owned

Coordination of concurrent work

A cleaning crew was working in a bund adjacent to a caustic storage tank. A caustic offload was scheduled in the same area. Neither activity had visibility of the other. During the transfer, pressurised pipework failed. Caustic sprayed across the work area. The crew were narrowly missed.

No procedure had been violated in isolation. The offload was authorised. The cleaning work was authorised. The gap was coordination, and the hazard existed entirely in the interaction between the two activities, not in either one alone.

Managing the response as area manager, coordinating the repair, and implementing permanent controls led to a site notification system with a physical key release mechanism: the offload key could not be released until all notification signatures were in place and all personnel in the affected area were accounted for.

That kind of incident does not appear in a permit audit. Both permits were issued correctly. The failure was the absence of any mechanism to make one activity aware of the other.

What this means for a review

In every case the documentation was present, the signatures were in place and the system appeared controlled. The gap was between what the paperwork recorded and what was physically happening, or about to happen, on the ground.

Most reviews ask

Do the procedures exist?

A Northshore review asks

Does the system maintain control when the site is busy, the pressure is real and the pace is high?

Compliance audits and internal inspections confirm that documentation is present. An independent operational review starts from a different question: how does this system actually behave when it is under load?

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Permit-to-Work ReviewWarehouse Review

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