Old footage of India flooding resurfaced as 'destruction from 2023 Cyclone Biparjoy'

This article is more than one year old.
Published on June 22, 2023 at 09:19
Updated on June 26, 2023 at 11:54
2 min read
By Devesh MISHRA, AFP India

A video of a town devastated by flooding has been viewed hundreds of times alongside social media posts that falsely claim it shows the destruction caused by Cyclone Biparjoy after it hit coastal areas of Pakistan and India in June 2023. The video has circulated alongside reports of massive flooding after heavy rains in September 2021.

"Cyclone Biparjoy wreaks havoc in Gujarat, the condition worsens Latest News #biporjoycyclone #storm #india #Gujarat," reads a Hindi-language caption shared here on Facebook on June 16, 2023.

More than 180,000 people in the Indian state of Gujarat and Pakistan's neighbouring Sindh province fled the path of Cyclone Biparjoy as it made landfall on June 15, AFP reported (archived link). Two drowned in flooding in Gujarat's Bhavnagar district.

The one-minute video, which has been viewed more than 700 times, shows houses and streets submerged in raging flood waters.

Screenshot of the false Facebook post, taken on June 20, 2023

The video was shared alongside the same false claim on Facebook here and here, and on Twitter here.

But the video circulated alongside reports of flooding in September 2021, nearly two years before Cyclone Biparjoy struck.

AFP ran a keyword search on Facebook using a Gujarati-language watermark seen in the video, which translates as "Gujarat weather news".

This led to a video uploaded on September 13, 2021 to a Facebook page called Gujarat weather news, which regularly covers extreme weather in the region (archived link).

It is captioned: "Flood situation after rain in Jamnagar." Jamnagar is a city in Gujarat state.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the video shared in the false post (left) and the video uploaded by Gujarat weather news (right):

Screenshot comparison of the video shared in the false post (left) and the video uploaded by Gujarat weather news(right)

Local media reported on September 14, 2021 that massive flooding wreaked havoc in Gujarat’s Rajkot and Jamnagar districts following heavy rainfall.

The same video was also used in a report about the heavy rain on Oneindia News' official YouTube channel on September 14, 2021. It can be seen at the 32-second mark of the YouTube post (archived link).

The clip is captioned: "Floods strike Gujarat's Jamnagar, Rajkot."

June 26, 2023 Paragraph 2 was corrected to say Cyclone Biparjoy made landfall on June 15, not June 16.

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