Massive floods have displaced tens of thousands of people in several regions of Nigeria in recent months. A video posted on social media claims to show a building collapsing following heavy flooding in the country’s north. However, the claim is false: the footage was filmed in the Great Himalayan Park in India in July 2023.
A video posted on Facebook with an audio track in Hausa claimed that a building had collapsed in Gusau, the capital of Zamfara, a state in northwestern Nigeria.
“This video shows flood in Gusau, what are you going to say about it?” says the narrator.
Many comments under the video contained prayers and empathised with the victims.
The video has been shared almost 300 times since it was posted on November 26, 2024.
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It was published by an account called Kannywood Celebrities, which regularly shares offbeat videos with its 77,000 followers.
The movie industry in northern Nigeria is called Kannywood.
In the clip, a green building is seen falling apart due to the heavy currents of a flood.
Screenshot of the false Facebook post taken on December 12, 2024
Several locations in northern Nigeria have been affected by floods in recent months (archived here).
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said over 70,000 people were affected by the floods in Zamfara, including more than 17,600 displaced persons (archived here).
However, the video was not filmed in Nigeria.
India’s 2023 floods
AFP Fact Check extracted keyframes from the video and ran reverse image searches on them using the InVid WeVerify tool.
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Results led to a video shared on Facebook on August 7, 2024 (archived here).
“Sainj Valley’s last year flood, 10 July 2023,” the caption reads.
Sainj Valley is one of the three valleys in the Great Himalayan National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site in India (archived here).
The area is a popular tourist attraction site with resorts and hotels to accommodate visitors.
Using satellite imagery from Google Earth, we traced the location of the flooding incident to Summer Hill Riverview Homestay in Sainj Valley.
The buildings are painted green with red edges, matching the collapsed structure in the video.
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Photos from visitors to the resort uploaded in April 2023 show the exact building before it collapsed during the flood three months later.
The structure is seen in a visitor’s photo, with the same iron rod on its red-edged roof and iron railings on the side.
On the left, a screenshot of satellite imagery showing the building before it collapsed with its iron rod (circled blue), red-edged roof (circled black), iron railings (circled orange); on the right, the collapsed building with the same features
In July 2023, AFP reported that at least 66 people died and several foreigners were stranded after monsoon rains caused heavy flooding in the Himalayas, where Sainj Valley is located (archived here).
AFP Fact Check has debunked several climate-related claims here.
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