Old video of rescue worker napping resurfaces following north China floods in August 2023
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on August 9, 2023 at 09:48
- 4 min read
- By AFP Hong Kong
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"A rescue worker fell asleep while leaning against a car, still holding his unfinished lunch box in his hands," reads text overlaid on a video shared on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, on August 7, 2023.
Text that appears at the beginning of the clip says it was shot on August 3 in the northern city of Zhuozhou, in Baoding, Hebei province (archived link).
The New York Times, citing state media, reported that Zhuozhou was one of several areas affected by a decision to divert floodwaters away from Beijing, as the region faced its most severe rains since records began 140 years ago (archived link).
The diversion further inundated Zhuozhou, situated just 60 kilometres (36 miles) away from the capital, which was already struggling with its own floods.
State media reported that thousands of firefighters had been deployed as part of rescue and evacuation efforts (archived link).
At least 30 people were killed in the floods, triggered by torrential rains brought by Storm Doksuri, a former super typhoon that hit the country in late July.
The same video was shared alongside similar claims on Twitter, which is being rebranded as "X", YouTube, Chinese social media platform Weibo and Chinese news aggregator Sohu.
But the video was shot three years earlier in eastern Jiangsu province.
Firefighters in Jiangsu
Keyword and reverse image searches on Google, Baidu and Sogou found similar, longer videos had been shared by Jiangsu province's fire department on its official Weibo and Kuaishou accounts on July 20, 2020 (archived links here and here).
The Weibo post states the video was taken on July 17, 2020 near Taihu, a lake next to Jiangsu's Wuxi city (archived link).
The Chinese government issued emergency alerts for Taihu and several other bodies of water in July 2020, mobilising rescue teams to shore up flood defences after near-continuous rains lashed central and eastern China.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video used in the misleading post (left) and the Kuaishou video from July 2020 (right):
Further keyword searches found the clip of the sleeping firefighter was used in an article about flood prevention work shared on the Huaian fire department's official WeChat account in August 2020 (archived link).
Huaian is a city in Jiangsu province (archived link).
The article states the rescue worker seen sleeping in the video is named Wan Song and that the clip had been taken by Li Guangtong, a correspondent for the department's Xiangyu rescue station.
Other photos in the article show personnel wearing similar equipment -- including a helmet that says "Jiangsu" -- to that seen in the misleadingly shared video (archived link).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video from the misleading post (left) and a photo from the WeChat article (right), with similarities highlighted by AFP:
The clip was also used in a video by Chinese media outlet The Paper in July 2020, which said firefighters had been resting after working for hours (archived link).
A licence plate, briefly seen behind a firefighter in The Paper's video, has the simplified Chinese character "Su" -- the abbreviation used for vehicles registered in Jiangsu province (archived link).
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