In the wake of the recent (July 2024) devastating floods in Assam (here and here), a video containing two clips allegedly related to the floods has gone viral. The first clip in this video features a bridge collapsing and washing away in flood water, and the second one shows a flooded railway track with a train getting toppled by the water. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: These video clips show the devastating effect the 2024 Assam floods on a bridge and a parked train.
Fact: Both video clips are old and unrelated to the 2024 Assam floods. The bridge collapse video was filmed in Indonesia in April 2021 during a flood in the Kambaniru River. The second clip featuring a train getting overturned by flood water was filmed in 2022 at the New Haflong Railway Station in the Dima Hasao district of Assam. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a reverse image search on a few of the first clips’ keyframes, leading us to a 2021 news report on the clip.
Reportedly, this was filmed in Indonesia. It shows a historical bridge named ‘Ahmad Yani Bridge’/ ‘Old Kambaniru Bridge’ collapsing due to a flash flood that occurred in the Kambaniru River. This incident occurred on 4 April 2021 in Indonesia’s East Sumba Regency, NTT.
A further search yielded news reports from Tibunenews and SBS News from 2021, which also featured the clip of ‘Old Kambaniru bridge’ collapsing and getting washed away by floodwaters.
To learn details about the second clip in the viral video, we performed a reverse image search on a few of its keyframes online. This search led us to multiple social media posts (here, here, and here) from 2022 that shared the same video clip. According to these posts, the video shows a flood situation in Assam’s ‘New Haflong Railway Station.’
We also found news reports (here, here, and here) on this incident from May 2022.
As per the reports, the Haflong railway station in the Dima Hasao District was flooded with water due to heavy rainfall, which caused a train parked on the tracks to topple. This evidence makes it clear that the video clips featured in the viral video are old and unrelated to the 2024 Assam floods.
To sum up, the viral clips claiming to show the devastating effects of the 2024 Assam floods are old and unrelated to the recent floods.
