Video shows a woman rescuing a koala from an Australian bushfire in 2019, not LA in 2025

On January 12, 2025, an account on Threads shared a video showing a woman rescuing a koala surrounded by flames.  

“Kind people saving animals from the California Fires,” reads the post shared more than 800 times.

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A screenshot of the false post on Threads, taken on January 27, 2025

In the clip, the injured koala tries to escape the flames of a wildfire. A woman follows it and pours water on it, while a man walks up with a white blanket. They wrap the animal in the blanket and take it to safety.

The same claim and video were repeated on Facebook.

Wildfires have ravaged 40,000 acres (16,000 hectares) in the Los Angeles area since January 7, killing more than two dozen people (archived link).

Tens of thousands of people fled their homes as the fires tore through the city of Altadena and the upscale neighbourhood of Pacific Palisades. 

Many animals were left stranded as pet owners fled for safety. 

While some were caught in the raging flames, viral posts claiming to show a koala being rescued from the Los Angeles wildfires are false. 

Australia, not LA

Using the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify, we located the same clip in news reports (here and here) published back in November 2019 about a woman saving a burnt koala caught up in a bushfire in Australia (archived here and here).

The video reports showed the animal covered in burns when it was plucked to safety by two people driving past the unfolding drama. 

AFP Fact Check matched the original footage from 2019 to the clip falsely linked to the blazes in California. 

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Screenshots from a news video of the koala being rescued (left) and the clip in the false post

Sadly, the koala nicknamed Lewis died a week after it was rescued (archived here).

Koalas are marsupials native to Australia. An estimated 60,000 were affected by massive fires that devastated southern Australia in 2019 (archived here).

At the time, a state of emergency was declared in two Australian states (archived here).

Read more of our debunks about the fires in Los Angeles here.