An old video showing a road collapse near a tunnel in Turkey is being shared as an incident near the Atal Tunnel in India
Amidst the active monsoon and flash floods due to cloudburst in Himachal Pradesh, a video showing a collapsing road near a tunnel is being shared on social media (here, here, and here) claiming that this took place near Atal Tunnel in Himachal Pradesh.
Claim: Visuals of road collapsing in front of Atal Tunnel, Himachal Pradesh in India.
Fact: These visuals depict a bridge near a tunnel in Darıcabaşı, situated on the Black Sea-Mediterranean Road in Ordu, Turkey. The incident occurred in Turkey in June 2023. There are no reports of a road collapse near the Atal Tunnel in India. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
Initially, we found no reports confirming this incident near the Atal Tunnel in India. A reverse image search of keyframes from the viral video led us to the same video posted on 12 October 2023, by a Facebook page called TV Teuta, a Montenegro-based media company. The caption, “Deti i Zi (Karadeniz) Turqi,” indicates that the video is from Turkey.
Taking this information as a clue, we conducted a keyword search in the Turkish language and found multiple news reports from Turkish media about the viral video (here, here, and here). According to these reports, the incident occurred in Turkey in June 2023. Some reports mentioned that a bridge near a tunnel in Darıcabaşı, located on the Black Sea-Mediterranean Road in Ordu, Turkey, had collapsed. Channel 5 television also covered the video on its YouTube channel, describing it as follows: “Due to heavy rain lasting three days in Ordu, the road collapsed at the tunnel exit on the Black Sea-Mediterranean Road in the Mesudiye district. Landslides occurred as a result of the heavy rain affecting the Ordu section of the Black Sea-Mediterranean Road, which indirectly impacts around 50 provinces. The culverts of the Çağlayan Stream at the Darıcabaşı Tunnel location on the Mesudiye district border could not handle the intense water flow and collapsed (translated).”
We also investigated the location of Darıcabaşı in Ordu, but we were unable to find the tunnel as Google Street View does not cover that area. To facilitate comparison, we used an image of the Atal Tunnel from Google. The tunnel entrance featured in the video we examined was semi-circular, whereas the Atal Tunnel’s entrance is rectangular. Below is a comparison between the two tunnels.
To sum up, an old video showing a road collapse near a tunnel in Turkey is being shared as it occurred near the Atal Tunnel in India.