Loren Kim Jacobson, 65, of Pocatello, Idaho, is headed to federal prison for a month — and into five months of home confinement — after pleading guilty to lying to OSHA and violating federal safety laws tied to a catastrophic tanker explosion in 2018. The owner of KCCS Inc., a tanker testing and repair company, was sentenced to three years of supervised release and hit with a $15,000 fine for crimes that endangered workers and defrauded federal regulators.
The explosion occurred on August 14, 2018, at Jacobson’s facility during a repair job gone wrong. A welder’s flame pierced the skin of a cargo tanker, igniting residual flammable material inside and severely injuring the worker. The blast exposed a web of lies and illegal practices that Jacobson had built into the daily operations of KCCS Inc. Instead of following basic safety protocol, Jacobson hid behind deception to avoid accountability.
When OSHA investigators arrived to probe the explosion, Jacobson lied straight to their faces. He claimed the injured welder was just an “observer,” not an employee, and insisted KCCS had no workers at all — a calculated move to dodge OSHA’s employer-based safety requirements. He also falsely stated he’d used a lower explosive limit meter to check for fumes before welding — a test that could have prevented the explosion. He didn’t run it. He just made it up.
Jacobson admitted he had no R-stamp certification — a federal requirement under the Hazardous Materials Transportation Act for anyone repairing cargo tankers. Despite this, he routinely conducted high-risk repairs, including sending employees inside tankers to weld patches from the interior so the illegal work wouldn’t show. These were confined space entries with no safety measures. The very repair that led to the explosion was one of these hidden, uncertified jobs.
But the fraud didn’t stop at one explosion. Jacobson had a pattern of faking pressure test results for cargo tanks — tests meant to prevent exactly this kind of disaster. Instead of actually testing valves that vent excess pressure, he scribbled fake numbers on forms and passed off junk equipment as safe. When confronted by Department of Transportation inspectors, he doubled down with forged documents. He later admitted to falsifying test results across multiple jobs.
“This tragic accident could have been prevented had the defendant adhered to OSHA workplace safety requirements,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Rafael M. Gonzalez, Jr. Jacobson’s greed and disregard for human life turned a repair shop into a death trap. Now he’ll serve time — a month behind bars, but a lifetime of reckoning for what happened in that Pocatello warehouse.
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Key Facts
- State: Idaho
- Agency: DOJ USAO
- Category: White Collar Crime
- Source: Official Source ↗
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