An old video from Ecuador of a group of people being swept away in a flash flood is viral with a false claim that it shows an accident in Gujarat, India.
The video has resurfaced on social media following an incident where five members of a family lost their lives in Lonavala's Bhushi dam in Pune, Maharashtra on June 30.
BOOM found that the video is from Ecuador and not Gujarat. The footage shows an accident that took place in Ecuador's Napo province in October 2023.
An X user posted the video with a caption in Hindi which translates to, "We will not change. After Lonavala, now in Gujarat also."
(Original Text in Hindi: हम नहीं सुधरेंगे। लोनावाला के बाद अब गुजरात में भी।)
The video is also viral on WhatsApp with similar captions claiming the incident is from India.
Click here to view the post and here for an archive.
Fact Check
BOOM was able to determine that the video is not from Gujarat, India as some of the posts contain an audio where a foreign language can be heard.
We first ran a keyword search to find news reports related to the viral claim but did not find any such report from India.
We then broke the video into multiple keyframes and did a reverse image search on them. This search led us to a Spanish report about the video published by Qué Noticias on October 17, 2023.
The report stated that the incident took place at the Holin waterfall in Ecuador's Napo province, where some tourists were swept away by a flash flood.
We then searched for news reports related to the accident in the Hollin river and found news reports published by Teleamazonas and Eluniverso regarding the same. The reports published on October 17, 2023, mentioned four tourists were swept away due to a flash flood in the Hollin river at the Archidona canton in Napo province of Ecuador. However, the tourists were rescued later.
Eluniverso's report stated that the accident happened on October 13, 2023. It further added that the river was calm when the tourists reached the place but the sudden rain led to the water rising to dangerous levels.
According to the report, a witness said that no damage happened because of the accident.
The reports carried visuals similar to the viral video. The comparison between the screenshots from the viral video and visuals published in the reports can be seen below.
