As floods inundated several provinces in Thailand, a video of submerged homes in Russia was widely shared by social media users, who mistakenly claimed it showed a northern province after a dam burst upstream in China. The video was filmed in a Russian village in April 2024. The Thai government said reports of a Chinese dam collapsing in northern Thailand in August 2024 were “fake news”.
“Breaking.. A Chinese dam burst, causing massive flooding in a residential area in Chiang Rai province,” read the caption of this TikTok video posted on August 27, 2024.
The nine-second clip, which shows a row of roofs barely protruding above the flood water, had been viewed more than 599,000 times as of September 4, 2024.
Similar fake messages in Thai were shared on various platforms, including here And here.
The same video was also shared misleadingly by Bangladeshi users here And heresuch as floods in South Asia millions affected (archived link).
While the northern part of Thailand affected by severe seasonal flooding in late August, a reverse image search revealed the video shows a village in Russia (archived link).
Months old Russian video
A reverse image search using Yandex found a YouTube video uploaded on April 14, 2024 showing a similar scene (archived link).
Part of the Russian-language title of the video reads: “This is what is happening in our village of Ivanovka: houses are flooded.”
At the beginning of the video, someone speaking Russian says: “Village Ivanovka. April 12. Residential complex in the Urals.”
Below is a screenshot of the comparison between the fake TikTok post (left) and the earlier YouTube video (right):
In a Report of April 12, The BBC reported: “Flooding in the Russian city of Orenburg has raised water levels two metres above the critical level, leaving only the roofs of some houses visible” (archived link).
The main photo shows flooded Russian homes with roofs similar to those in the video mistakenly shared in Thailand.
Below is a screenshot of the Thai video (left) and the BBC headline from April 12, 2024 (right):
The same video was previously wrongly attributed to flooding in several countries, including Keyna, Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates. It has been debunked by fact-checkers around the world, including here, here And here (archived links here, here And here).
‘No dam break’
There are no official reports of a dam burst in China in August 2024.
In July 2024, a dam burst in central China’s Hunan province caused flooding and forced nearly 6,000 people to evacuate from nearby areas, state media quoted AFP at that time, but no casualties were reported (archived link).
The Thai government-run Anti-Fake News Center has also a statement issued On August 31, he denied the claim that a collapsed dam in China had caused flooding in Thailand (archived link).
“The Office of National Water Resources has investigated the claim and confirmed that this claim is not true. Currently, there is no news about the Chinese dam bursting.”
