Video compilation of unrelated floods falsely linked to Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica
- Published on November 25, 2025 at 08:24
- 7 min read
- By Oluseyi AWOJULUGBE, AFP Nigeria
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Jamaica has been counting the cost of the damage from Hurricane Melissa in October, which wreaked havoc on the Caribbean island, spreading nearly five million tonnes of debris. However, a video widely shared on social media falsely claims to show floodwaters after the Category 5 hurricane made landfall. Reverse image searches found the clips in the compilation were taken from incidents in Italy, Mexico, Taiwan and Bulgaria, and geolocation confirmed this.
“The devastation caused by the recent disaster in Jamaica is truly heartbreaking. Entire communities have been affected, homes destroyed, and families displaced. In times like this, solidarity and compassion matter most,” reads the caption of a video shared on Instagram in Nigeria.
The post -- which has received more than 2,000 likes -- was posted on October 29, 2025, one day after Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica.
The footage was published on the verified Instagram account of Guardian Nigeria, a newspaper based in Lagos, which credited an X account.
However, several comments under the X post suggested the video was false.
The footage also appeared on Facebook, alongside a similar false claim, where it was shared more than 600 times.
Melissa caused widespread damage in Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic (archived here).
The death toll from the incident was estimated at 65 across the Caribbean, however, that figure was expected to rise (archived here). The storm was made more powerful by human-caused climate change, according to a study by Imperial College London (archived link).
But the scenes in the video compilation are not from Jamaica.
Bulgaria, October 2025
The opening scene in the compilation shows cars being swept away in a flood.
A reverse image search revealed the same video was published by the BBC in early October 2025, weeks before Hurricane Melissa struck Jamaica (archived here).
It was taken in Bulgaria, where four people died in Elenite after heavy rains along the Black Sea coast (archived here).
Italy, July 2025
The second segment, showing a river torrent beneath a bridge, has circulated online since July 2025, when heavy rains caused flooding in Bardonecchia, northern Italy (archived here).
The video also appeared in English and Italian reports here, here and here (archived here, here and here).
AFP Fact Check traced the exact location where the opening parts of the video were filmed alongside the river on Viale Bramafam road in Bardonecchia, matching the bridge, signage, the wooden railing and the apartment block on Google Maps.
Mexico, October 2025
Image searches revealed that at least three different segments of footage from the video show flooding in Mexico more than two weeks before Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica.
A keyframe from one of the clips was published on October 14, 2025, by Chilean media outlet La Tercera, which credited an unnamed account on X for the image (archived here).
A backup Instagram account belonging to a Venezuelan media company, Diario de Los Andes, posted the photo a day earlier as part of its coverage of the same disaster (archived here).
Although the articles don’t specify the location of the image, Spanish-language posts sharing the photo (here and here) used hashtags mentioning Veracruz, home to the oil town of Poza Rica, which was inundated when the Cazones river burst its banks, and where AFP filmed cleanup operations (here, here, here and here).
Another frame showing houses fully submerged also appears to have been lifted from footage taken in Poza Rica.
A video of the scene was published on TikTok on October 10, 2025, with a caption translating to: “Total destruction in Poza Rica” (archived here).
@poderdeleon Destrucción total en POZA Rica.
♬ sonido original - Gerardo Alvarez
A third clip briefly shows a flooded Good Year tyre shop.
This can be geolocated to Poza Rica.
Another video published by the Australian Broadcasting Service on October 12, 2025, shows the same Good Year branch after much of the flowing water had receded (archived here).
Mexico police van
A scene in the video compilation appears to show a police truck stuck on a flooded road.
The words on the vehicle's tailgate read “Policía Municipal”, a Spanish term that means municipal police or local police in English.
A reverse image search on a keyframe led to a TikTok clip -- since removed -- showing the van pushing another vehicle to safety.
The hashtags in the caption are #priscilla, #hurricane, and #loscabos. Three weeks before Melissa, Hurricane Priscilla struck several states in Mexico, including Baja California, home to the region of Los Cabos and the city of Cabo San Lucas (archived here).
A keyword search for images of police vehicles in Los Cabos found a likeness to the one in the video published by the Mexican media organisation Radar Politico (archived here). Comparisons show matching paintwork, identical black frames in the rear, and the same brand of pickup truck, RAM.
Furthermore, the livery on the vehicles of the Jamaica Constabulary Force is in English and looks entirely different.
Tornado vs hurricane
At the 30-second mark in the video, a tornado is shown – a vastly different weather phenomenon from a hurricane.
Tornadoes are spinning funnel-shaped columns of air that stretch from dark thunderclouds to the ground (archived here). In comparison, hurricanes form over warm tropical oceans (archived here).
AFP Fact Check was unable to trace the source of the tornado image.
AFP Fact Check has debunked other misinformation about Hurricane Melissa here.
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