Sanjeeb Phuyal is the Nepali Editor of Newschecker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He brings over a decade of experience writing and editing news. In his previous stint, he worked as online editor for The Kathmandu Post. With the growth of social media platforms—and the ever-growing competition amongst media outlets to churn out breaking news, he feels that fact-checking every piece of information has become more essential today than ever before.
Claim
Vehicles Swept Away By Recent Floods In Nepal
Fact
Viral video is from Manali of Himachal Pradesh in India
As many places of Nepal including Kathmandu witnessed monsoon-triggered floods last week, several unverified videos and images claiming to show inundation in Nepal are being shared online. One such video purportedly showing a flash flood washing away a truck, among other vehicles, in Nepal is going viral on TikTok.
TikTok user @sameer_ever1 posted a video showing a raging flood in a river pushing two huge vehicles—a truck and a passenger bus. The footage shows vehicles being washed away by raging floods. Text superimposed on the video reads, “Flood in Nepal. The Budhi River has gone crazy.” In the background audio, panic-stricken people are heard screaming. Though the video claims to show flooding the Budhi River of Nepal, the video doesn’t specify where exactly the incident happened.
The archived version of the TikTok video can be seen here.
The video posted on August 11 has garnered 17.3k likes, 611 users have shared it and 296 people have commented until the time of publishing this article.
Newschecker found the claim to be misleading.
Fact Check /Verification
To check the veracity of the claim made in the viral video, Newschecker scanned through the comments of the video and found that many TikTok users pointed out that the video is not from Nepal but India. We, then, took several keyframes from the video and conducted reverse searches on them. The search led us to a video titled’ Manali flood’ posted on the YouTube channel named India Boy. The video frame from the 0.40-minute timestamp onwards exactly matched the viral video. The video was posted on 6 August, 2023.
We also found the same video, dated 5 August, 2023, showing a massive flood sweeping away a truck and a bus. The video titled ‘Live Manali floods’ was published on a YouTube channel named AQ Affiliate.
On checking another video from the same incident posted on the channel, we noticed a green-roofed building on the bank of the flooding river while the camera was rotated to show the upstream of the flooding river.
Further, Newschecker found a short video titled ‘Manali Rain fury caught on camera’ published on the YouTube channel of India Today. We found a close resemblance between the green building seen on the footage of India today and the frame of the second video of AQ Affiliate. The description of the video dated July 10 read ‘Furor due to floods and rains in Himachal’.
We compared the frames from the India Today footage and AQ Affiliate video and noticed the same blue board of Hotel Zannat, Restaurant, thus lending credence to the fact that both the videos were captured in the same location.
We also found a video published on the YouTube channel of Hindustan Times which showed visuals of heavy rains ravaging several places of Himachal Pradesh in July.
Thus, our findings clearly showed that the footage showing vehicles being washed away is from Himachal in India.
Conclusion
No, the viral video doesn’t show vehicles including a truck being swept away by a raging river. The footage actually shows monsoon fury from Manali in Himachal Pradesh of India.
Result: Missing Context
Sources
Indian Boy/YouTube August 7, 2023
AQ Affiliate/YouTube August 5, 2023
AQ Affiliate/YouTube August 12, 2023
India Today/YouTube 10 July, 2023
The Hindustan Times, 11 July, 2023
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Sanjeeb Phuyal is the Nepali Editor of Newschecker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He brings over a decade of experience writing and editing news. In his previous stint, he worked as online editor for The Kathmandu Post. With the growth of social media platforms—and the ever-growing competition amongst media outlets to churn out breaking news, he feels that fact-checking every piece of information has become more essential today than ever before.
