Clips of fire damage falsely shared as Europe heatwave aftermath
- Published on July 15, 2026 at 15:07
- 3 min read
- By Judith KANTNER, Samad UTHMAN, AFP Germany, AFP Nigeria
Videos of deformed traffic lights spread across social media with claims that the fixtures melted in the intense heat that struck Europe in June. This is false; the signals were damaged in accidental fires unrelated to the 2026 heat dome.
"Europe is literally melting! With heat waves already approaching 40 and 45 °C, the traffic lights in Italy and Germany couldn't withstand the pressure and have started to melt," reads the caption of a Facebook post published on June 28, 2026.
Similar claims were shared on Threads, YouTube, Facebook, and X as several European countries broke temperature records in late June 2026 (archived here).
A heat dome trapped hot air from North Africa over the Iberian Peninsula before spreading as far as the United Kingdom, eventually weakening over central and eastern parts of the continent in early July.
While the posts accurately identified the countries where the heatwave was observed, there were no reports of traffic lights melting in Germany or Italy.
Burnt by fire
In the Facebook claim, the 29-second video shows two different parts. The first ends at 0'07", while the second plays till the end.
Through reverse image searches, AFP Fact Check found that the first part of the clip was first posted on June 24 on Facebook and Instagram by accounts that appear to belong to a resident from Verona in Lugagnano, Italy.
The text overlay says in Italian that it is so hot the "traffic lights are melting," but many commenters seemed to take the post as a joke.
AFP Fact Check reached out to the account holder for comment, but a response was not forthcoming. On Instagram, the user commented a day later with a link to an Italian article that reported how the stoplight melted in a fire (archived here).
A local news outlet published footage matching the location of the clip showing a car on fire on June 23 in Lugagnano, Verona (archived here, here, and here).
Through a Google Maps search, AFP Fact Check verified that the locations of the misleading video shared on social media and the small Verona fire matched (archived here and here).
German stoplight
AFP Fact Check also subjected the second part of the video to scrutiny.
German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) debunked the false claim on June 29 (archived here).
DPA reported the damaged traffic light was located at an intersection in the Berlin district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, near the Spree River, which AFP Fact Check confirmed through a search on Google Maps (archived here).
InfraSignal, a Berlin-based company responsible for managing the city's network of traffic lights, told DPA that a fire caused the damage (archived here).
InfraSignal also confirmed to AFP Fact Check that the damage to the traffic light was caused by a fire that destroyed a nightclub a year earlier.
"We are not aware of any case in which signal heads suffer such damage at 40°C," said an InfraSignal spokesperson in a June 29, 2026, email.
Several commonly used materials for urban infrastructures have vastly higher melting points than the temperatures observed across Europe (archived here).
"Metal has very high temperature thresholds before it can buckle like the one in the videos," University of Cambridge sustainable built environment and health professor, Ronita Bardhan, told AFP Fact Check on July 2 (archived here).
A recent analysis by the scientific consortium World Weather Attribution concluded that intense heat events are increasing rapidly, "with such events tens to hundreds of times more likely since only 2003 and virtually impossible just 50 years ago" (archived here and here).
Thousands of excess deaths were recorded during the extreme weather events ravaging Europe, as this kind of heat puts human bodies under intense pressure, sometimes leading to dehydration, heatstroke and death (archived here).
AFP Fact Check has debunked other heatwave claims.
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