A month-old time-lapse showing a courtyard being submerged by floodwaters has resurfaced in social media posts that falsely claimed it showed flooding in the Wayanad district of southern India’s Kerala state in July 2024. The footage, however, has circulated in posts and reports about flash flooding in southern China’s Guangdong province in mid-June.
“Terrific footage in #Wayanad, Kerala,” read part of the caption to a video posted on X on July 30, 2024.
The video — timelapse footage that appears to have come from a security camera — shows a home’s gated courtyard being submerged by floodwaters.
The clip was shared after at least 108 people were killed after landslides triggered by pounding monsoon rains struck tea plantations before dawn in the district of Wayanad, in India’s southern coastal state of Kerala (archived link).
Another 128 people were hospitalised for treatment after being rescued from the mud and debris.
The district is famed for the tea estates that crisscross its hilly countryside and which rely on a large pool of casual labourers for planting and harvest.
The same video was also shared alongside similar claims elsewhere on X here and here.
But the footage circulating online is timestamped as being from June 16, and circulated online in news reports at least a month before the disaster in Wayanad.
Meizhou floods
A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the falsely shared video led to a longer version of the same footage posted on June 25 by a YouTube channel that regularly posts clips of natural disasters and extreme weather (archived link).
The clip is titled: “16 June 2024 – Meizhou, Guangdong, China – Timelapse of severe flooding.”
AFP reported on June 26 that at least 38 people had died in heavy rains and flooding around the city of Meizhou, citing figures provided by authorities (archived link).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video used in the false posts (left) and the YouTube video (right):
In the top-right corner of the video is the logo for Qiaoan CCTV, a security camera maker based in Guangdong (archived link).
A subsequent keyword search was also shared on Chinese social media platforms, including Bilibili on June 26 where it was captioned, “Flooding in Meizhou, Guangdong” (archived link).
Further searches found the same video embedded in Chinese-language reports here and here about the flooding in Meizhou (archived links here and here).
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