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
A Hindu temple survived the Los Angeles fire while the neighborhood houses were reduced to ashes.
Fact
Image carried in the viral video shows an old photo of Maui house.
Even as 27 people have been killed and an estimated 12,300 structures have been destroyed due to the wind-driven blazes in Southern California, an image allegedly showing a red-roofed building that survived the blaze while its neighborhood houses have been reduced to ashes, is going viral. The viral video goes on to claim that the house is a small temple of Hindu God Ram where people from Hindu faith gather.
TikTok user @dear.lc posted a video showing a red-roofed building, untouched, in the midst of burnt down houses. Text superimposed on the video reads, “Everything was reduced to ashes California of America. But a small temple of Hindu Lord Ram, where people from Hindu community used to gather, remained unscathed.”
The video posted on January 12 has garnered 179.6k likes, 5818 users have shared it and 3998 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, Newschecker took several key-frames from the viral video and ran reverse searches on them. A Yandex reverse search on a frame from the viral image threw up several articles pointing us towards the home that survived a wild fire in western Maui in Lahaina, Hawaii in August 2023.
On checking an article, dated August 24, 2023, published on The Hill online, we found that the image carried in the viral video exactly matched the viral video. The article reported about a 100-year-old wooden home that stood unscathed when wild fires destroyed Lahaina community houses in Maui, Hawaii.
Further, we checked another article, dated August 22, 2023, published on BBC about the Lahania house that survived Maui fires. We found that the image carried in the viral video also resembled the viral video.
Thus, our findings clearly indicated that the viral video shows the red-roofed home that remained unscathed after a wildfire in August 2023 in the historic Maui town of Lahaina in Hawaii, USA.
Conclusion
No, the viral video doesn’t show a Hindu temple that survived the Los Angeles wildfires. The image carried in the viral video is from Maui of Hawaii that survived the massive fire in August 2023.
Result: False
Sources
NBC News, Jan 18, 2025
The Hill, August 24, 2023
BBC, August 22, 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.
