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PeakMetrics / Fact Checks

Disasters & emergencies fact checks

Explore claims publishers have checked about disasters & emergencies. Read their original ratings and follow the evidence.

3,259 published reviews in this topic

FACTLYDisasters & emergencies

Visuals of a building collapsing in Turkey due to earthquake on 06 February 2023

Publisher’s rating: MISLEADING

The claim concerns a video presented as showing a building collapsing during the earthquake in Turkey on 06 February 2023. The review says the video instead shows an earlier collapse in Izmir, Turkey, during an earthquake on 30 October 2020. It therefore concludes that the footage is old, not a visual record of the February 2023 earthquake. To investigate, FACTLY reports conducting a reverse image search of the viral video. That search led to a video uploaded by Guardian News on 30 October 2020; its title describes footage of a building collapsing in İzmir. The review also cites media reports that a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the city on 30 October 2020. Together, the identified earlier upload and the event date place the building-collapse footage in the 2020 earthquake, rather than the event claimed in the post. The review adds that other clips in the viral video also came from the 2020 Turkey earthquake. Its conclusion is specific to the footage it examined: the post’s presentation of the building collapse as recent footage from the February 2023 earthquake is misleading because the video depicts the 2020 event.

FACTLYDisasters & emergencies

Visuals of hailstorm in Udaipur, India

Publisher’s rating: MISLEADING

The claim concerns a video circulated as recent hailstorm visuals from Udaipur, Rajasthan. FACTLY distinguishes the existence of hailstorms in parts of Rajasthan from the provenance of this particular video: its finding is that the footage shows a hailstorm in Nepal on 18 April 2020, not the Rajasthan weather event. The review therefore concludes that the video does not substantiate the claim that it shows Udaipur.

Factcrescendo Sri LankaDisasters & emergencies

A footage inside the Yeti Airline plane in that accident !!

Publisher’s rating: False

The review examined a Facebook video presented as footage from inside the Yeti Airlines plane shortly before the Nepal crash. It describes the post’s caption as “Footage of Nepal airplane incident” and says the video was claimed to show “footage from inside the ill-fated Yeti Airlines plane seconds before the crash.” The review notes that the clip appeared staged or animated, then describes checking its origins rather than treating its appearance as proof of what happened aboard the aircraft. The investigators used keyframes from the video for reverse-image searches, which led them to the YouTube channel of 3D artist Ayoub Attache. The review reports that Attache had uploaded the clip in June 2021, before the Nepal accident, and described it as a plane-crash simulation made in Unreal Engine 5. On that basis, the clip was not footage from the Yeti Airlines accident: it was an earlier 3D simulation misrepresented as crash footage.

FACTLYDisasters & emergencies

The video shows visuals of snow-filled roads in Haryana’s Barwala

Publisher’s rating: MISLEADING

The claim concerns a video of a road in Barwala, Haryana, presented as showing snowfall. The review describes the visible material as “white snowlike matter,” and concludes that the footage shows hail rather than snow. It reports finding no news reports of snowfall in Barwala, either historically or at the time of the claim. To establish the footage’s provenance, the review says it found an extended version on YouTube titled “Barwala by pass # hailstorm #full rain fall barwala news,” uploaded on 14 March 2020. It then compared the video’s location with a photograph of a Dainik Bhaskar Haryana report uploaded on 15 March 2020, finding that the location matched. The review also says Google Street View matched the location shown in that photograph. The investigation describes further footage posted on 14 March 2020 by a local journalist and a media outlet, which it says shows a hailstorm in Barwala. It also notes that Dainik Jagran reported on effects of the hailstorm on local crop farms on 17 March 2020. According to the review, these reports and posts describe hail, not snowfall. Taken together, the dated video and the matching location evidence support the conclusion that the viral footage was of a 2020 hailstorm, not snow-covered roads.