Video shows woman swept away by mudslide in Peru in 2017, not Chinese flood survivor in 2023
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on August 16, 2023 at 08:56
- 4 min read
- By Clara IP, AFP Hong Kong
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"Even scarier than in the movies, and yet the officials still claim there are no casualties!" reads the simplified Chinese caption of a video posted here on X, formerly known as Twitter, on August 6, 2023.
The one-minute 13-second video appears to show a woman covered in mud trying to untangle herself from logs, tree branches and wooden pallets. She eventually manages to free herself from the debris and reach safety, where she is helped by other people. In the background, a current of fast-moving mud continues to sweep debris away.
Text on the video, which has since been shared more than 550 times, reads: "The flood is ruthless."
The same footage was also shared elsewhere on X here and the Chinese video-sharing platform Kuaishou here alongside similar claims.
It was shared after mainland China was struck in late July by Storm Doksuri, a former super typhoon that brought the most severe rains to northern China since records began 140 years ago.
The deluge followed weeks of historic heat, with scientists saying such extreme weather events are being exacerbated by climate change.
AFP reported on August 11 that rescuers were still searching for people swept away by floods, and streets in parts of Hebei, which borders the capital Beijing, were still caked in mud.
The video circulating on social media, however, does not show a flood survivor in China; it was in fact filmed in Peru in March 2017.
Mudslide in Punta Hermosa, Peru
A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the video led to similar footage published by British newspaper The Guardian here on March 17, 2017 (archived link).
The clip, which captures a wider view of the incident, is titled: "Peru flooding: woman scrambles out of vast mudslide – video."
The Guardian's clip matches the 33-second-long section that begins at the falsely shared video's 38-second mark.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the falsely shared video (left) and clip posted by The Guardian (right), with the corresponding segment of The Guardian video highlighted by AFP:
The Guardian clip's subtitles indicates people in the video are shouting: "A person! There's a person in there!" These voices can also be heard in the falsely shared video.
The clip's description identifies the woman as Evangelina Chamorro Díaz and says she managed to escape without serious injury after a huge mudslide crashed through the outskirts of Lima.
AFP reported at the time that the country had been pummelled with rain, sending a series of mudslides barrelling down the hillsides of the Andes mountains.
A further search led to longer footage posted by the social media intelligence agency Storyful on March 16, 2017 (archived link).
The five-minute, 33-second-long video's description says it was filmed in Punta Hermosa, a district to the south of the capital Lima (archived link).
The area where the footage was filmed in Punta Hermosa can be seen on Google Street View imagery from 2015 (archived link).
A photo tagged with the same location was uploaded to Google Maps in October 2017, and shows many of the same features visible in the falsely shared video (archived link).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the false post (left and centre) and the photo available on Google Maps (right), with similarities highlighted by AFP:
AFP has previously debunked another misleading claim related to flooding in China in August 2023.
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