Signing you in

Riddhish DuttaKolkata,UPDATED: Aug 27, 2026 15:14 IST .ai_assist_bar2 { top:30px } Devastating flash floods have caused widespread destruction along the Tibet-Nepal border, with nearly 180 people dead and more than 1,000 missing. As rescue operations continue, the death toll is expected to rise.

The exact cause of the disaster is yet to be officially confirmed. Meanwhile, a video of a massive mudslide has been widely shared on social media. The clip is a compilation of two separate videos: the first shows a mudslide rapidly turning into a torrent of muddy floodwater, and the second captures a two-storey house on a riverbank being swept away by rising floodwaters.

Sharing the video, people wrote captions like, "The first moments of the disaster that occurred in Nepal," and, "The first moments of the disaster in Nepal."

India Today Fact Check found that both videos are old and unrelated to Nepal. The first is from Myanmar, and the second is from the United States.OUR PROBE

A reverse search of the first video’s frames led us to an extended version of the clip, posted by an Instagram account on June 30. This confirmed that it is unrelated to the recent Nepal floods.

We also found the full version of the clip on a YouTube channel that uploaded it on January 28, 2024. While the caption did not specify the location, it repeatedly referenced Myanmar, indicating the footage originated there.

We also found a report featuring screenshots from the video, dated January 25, 2024, stating that the incident occurred in the Hpakant mining area of Myanmar between January 24 and 25 that year. A further search led us to a report by EOS.org, a digital science-news publication by the American Geophysical Union, which compared satellite images of the site from Planet Labs before and after the event.

Searching with Burmese keywords, we found an eight-minute video of the same flood, recorded from the opposite direction, uploaded to the official YouTube channel of Kachin News Group, a Myanmar-based media outlet, on January 25, 2024. The video's description noted that a pond near Sankha village, in the jade-mining area of Hpakant town, burst around 3 pm that day. Local authorities also stated this, as reported in a Burmese-language report dated January 30, 2024.

A reverse search of frames from the second clip led us to a Fox Weather report dated June 14, 2022, featuring an image of the same two-storey house on its cover. According to the report, the video shows flooding and a sudden rise in water levels along the Yellowstone River in Gardiner, Montana, USA. The house reportedly belonged to a man named Parker Manning, who filmed the video himself while vacationing with his family half a mile upstream.NEPAL FLOODS

While the exact cause of the Nepal floods is yet to be confirmed, preliminary findings based on satellite imagery suggest that an ice-rock avalanche struck the Lhende River in Tibet, around 20 km north-east of the Nepal-China border crossing, triggering the disaster, according to an Al Jazeera report.

It is therefore evident that two unrelated and old videos were falsely shared as visuals of the flash floods in Nepal.- EndsPublished By: Pathikrit SanyalPublished On: Aug 27, 2026 15:14 IST