CALIFORNIA—On July 31, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office announced that three Virgin Scent Corporation executives, Yaakov Nourollah, 40; Akiva Nourollah, 37; and Yehuda Nourolla, 38; along with the company, pleaded no contest to charges related to the fire at the warehouse at 16325 South Avalon Boulevard in Carson.
Each defendant was charged with one felony count of disposing of hazardous materials and one misdemeanor count each of reckless storage of hazardous materials. In addition to one misdemeanor count per person of unlawful depositing of hazardous materials, which is a violation of the Clean Water Act, and one count per person for failure to report the discharge.
Virgin Scent Incorporated sells products under the brand name ArtNaturals and stored alcohol-based hand sanitizers in the Carson warehouse. On September 30, 2021, a fire erupted at the warehouse, releasing chemicals into the storm drains and spreading to the Dominguez Channel. It is a stream that runs through the Dominguez Watershed, which is located in Southern LA County. The fire was later extinguished. Thousands of residents in towns located around the channel became sick from smelling an odor similar to rotten eggs. It took several months for the smell to vanish.
All defendants received two years of supervised probation and were originally sentenced to one year in a Los Angeles County jail, which was suspended, and each person was required to complete 75 hours of community labor.
It has not been decided whether they will be required to make restitution. The case was investigated by the District Attorney’s Bureau of Investigation and the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
The Clean Water Act was written in 1972 by the United States Congress to protect the nation’s waterways and was signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon.
Virgin Scent Incorporated negotiated a $3.8 million settlement to a class action lawsuit. The company did not disclose that the hand sanitizers it sold during the COVID-19 pandemic contained chemicals such as methanol and benzene.
On December 16, 2025, a California judge imposed a $10 million penalty on the company for failing to get legal permission to release chemicals into the storm drain. That judge also imposed a $575,000 penalty for releasing pollution. The ruling came from a lawsuit brought by the Los Angeles Office of the California State Water Resources Control Board.
Canyon News reached out to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office and was told it had no comment beyond the information in the office’s press release.
