A timelapse video of a flooding front gate of a house in China is being shared with a false claim that it it is from the heavy rainfall that has caused floods and landslide in several parts of Kerala's Wayanad district.
BOOM found that the footage is not from Wayanad, Kerala and shows a flooding incident in Meizhou city, China.
More than 200 people have recently lost their lives due to some devastating landslides in Kerala's Wayanad district. News reports stated that the Indian Army was able to rescue around 1,000 people, with 220 individuals still missing because of the disaster. The villages of Mundakkai, Chooralmala, Attamala, and Noolpuzha in the district were the severely affected by landslides, added the reports.
Several right-wing social media users shared the video with a Hindi caption that translates to, "Today you can see the real truth of Kerala model. Amit Shah ji said in the Parliament that the Central Meteorological Department sent a written warning to the Kerala government four times that a huge landslide would occur in Wayanad. The last warning was sent on 26 July in which it was said that the Kerala government should move people from that entire area to a safe place because there would be a landslide there. But the Kerala government did nothing. And more than 200 people died. This is the Kerala model of the leftists, where someone brings gold from his rectum and someone ignores the weather department's warning".
(Original Text in Hindi: आज आप केरल मॉडल का असली सच्चाई देखिए संसद में अमित शाह जी ने कहा कि कुल चार बार केरल सरकार को केंद्र के मौसम विभाग ने लिखित चेतावनी भेजा कि वायनाड में काफी बड़ा भूस्खलन होगा 26 जुलाई को अंतिम चेतावनी भेजी गई थी जिसमें कहा गया था कि केरल सरकार उस पूरे एरिया से लोगों को सुरक्षित जगह पर ले जाए क्योंकि यहां भूस्खलन होगा लेकिन केरल सरकार ने कुछ नहीं किया और करीब 200 से ज्यादा लोगों का मौत हुआ यही वामपंथियों का केरल मॉडल है जो कोई अपने रेक्टम में से सोना लाता है तो कोई मौसम विभाग की चेतावनी को नजरअंदाज कर देता है)
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Fact Check
The video carries a date and timestamp on the upper left corner indicating it was recorded on June 16, 2024. This is before the devastating landslide in Wayanad on July 30, 2024.
We then ran a reverse image search on several keyframes from the video and found that a verified X account had posted the same video on June 23, 2024 detailing that the video was from Meizhou city in China.
The text translates to, "Surveillance video reveals the truth: Pingyuan County reservoir released floodwater without warning, causing the flood to rise 2 meters in 3 hours! On June 16, at Huangtian Reservoir in Huangtian Village, Pingyuan County, Meizhou, Guangdong, the flood suddenly broke out at noon, leaving the villagers with nowhere to escape. The local villagers did not receive an evacuation notice until 3 pm, by which time the village was already submerged by 2 meters of floodwater. The official report stated that the flood caused 38 deaths and 2 missing persons."
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Following this lead, we ran a related keyword search and came across a news report published by New Tang Dynasty Television on June 24, 2024, which included screenshots from the viral video.
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The NTDTV report in Chinese stated that the video, which initially appeared on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, shows the fully submerged front gate of a house in Zhangyan Village, Pingyuan County. According to the article, the incident occurred is from June 16 when officials at the Huangtian Reservoir in Huangtian Village, Pingyuan County, Meizhou, Guangdong Province, suddenly released floodwaters.
The New York Times on June 24, 2024, reported on the heavy rainfall in the region as, "The city of Meizhou, home to about 3.8 million people, began experiencing "once-in-a-century" rainfall last week, according to state media. Initially, officials reported that nine people in Meizhou had died. But on Friday afternoon, the death toll leaped dramatically, as officials reported an additional 38 deaths in Pingyuan, a county under Meizhou’s jurisdiction. Two more people there were still missing, they said, though no more information has been released."