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Catastrophic flash floods have wreaked havoc along the Tibet-Nepal frontier, leaving nearly 180 fatalities and over 1,000 individuals missing. Search and rescue missions are actively underway, and authorities fear the death toll will climb further.
Although the official trigger for the catastrophe remains unverified, social media platforms have been flooded with a viral video depicting a massive mudslide. The footage stitches together two distinct clips: the first captures a mudslide violently escalating into a rushing wave of muddy water, while the second shows a two-story home situated on a riverbank being completely washed away by surging floods.
Users circulating the footage have tagged it with captions such as, “The first moments of the disaster that occurred in Nepal,” and, “The first moments of the disaster in Nepal.”
An investigation revealed that both segments of the video are archival and entirely unrelated to the current crisis in Nepal. The opening clip originates in Myanmar, whereas the second comes from the United States.
INVESTIGATION
A reverse-image search of the initial video’s keyframes tracked down an extended version shared by an Instagram user on June 30, disproving its connection to the recent Himalayan floods.
Further tracking led to the complete footage hosted on a YouTube channel, published on January 28, 2024. Although the poster omitted a specific address, repeated mentions of Myanmar pointed to its true geographical origin.
Investigators also uncovered a documentation page containing stills from the video, dated January 25, 2024, which noted that a mud disaster struck the Hpakant mining district in Myanmar between January 24 and 25. Additional verification came from a report by EOS.org—a science news outlet operated by the American Geophysical Union—which cross-referenced Planet Labs satellite photographs of the area taken before and after the event.
Using Burmese search parameters, researchers located an eight-minute recording of the identical flood captured from a different angle on the official YouTube channel of the Kachin News Group, a local media organization, uploaded on January 25, 2024. The description explained that a retention pond near Sankha village, located within the Hpakant jade-mining zone, breached around 3 PM that afternoon, a detail corroborated by local officials in a Burmese-language report from January 30, 2024.
Meanwhile, tracing the second clip through a reverse-image lookup directed researchers to a Fox Weather segment published on June 14, 2022, which utilized the image of the same two-story house as its thumbnail. According to the broadcast, the footage documents extreme flooding along the Yellowstone River in Gardiner, Montana. The residence belonged to Parker Manning, who recorded the event himself while vacationing with relatives a half-mile upstream.
THE REAL NEPAL FLOODS
While definitive conclusions regarding the Nepal disaster are still pending, preliminary assessments of satellite data point to an ice-rock avalanche impacting the Lhende River in Tibet—approximately 20 kilometers northeast of the Nepal-China border—as the primary catalyst, according to an Al Jazeera report.
Ultimately, the evidence confirms that these two unrelated, older recordings have been falsely misrepresented online as footage of the devastating flash floods in Nepal.
– Ends
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