A video of a tornado in Dolores, Uruguay in 2016 was passed off by Bengali news channel ABP Ananda as footage showing Cyclone Yaas in Odisha, on Wednesday. The video shows strong gusts of wind blowing away trees in its path.
The clip was misreported is in the backdrop of Cyclone Yaas making landfall on May 26, 2021, in Odisha. Warnings had also been issued in West Bengal and Jharkhand with people being evacuated to safer places. A 'mini tornado' was reported in Hooghly district of West Bengal on May 25, 2021, killing two people after being electrocuted ahead of Cyclone Yaas making landfall.
ABP Ananda broadcasted the clip in their afternoon news bulletin on May 26, 2021, to falsely claim that it shows cyclone Yaas' landfall at Dhamra, Odisha.
The same visuals were played for as long as four minutes with the false claim. The anchor can be heard saying, "We can see the moment during the landfall of the cyclone in Odisha's Dhamra. This is Yaas' landfall visuals at the time when it made landfall at Odisha's Dhamra. Watch the scary visuals how the trees are being uprooted and swept off. Yaas' mayhem can be seen now as it made landfall. These visuals are from the time when Yaas made the landfall. This is how Yaas created a catastrophe."
She then approaches a panelist, scientist Parthasarathi Mukherjee to speak about the visuals of the landfall of Yaas who says, "This is true. The IMD had predicted a wind speed of 155-165 km/h. The visuals are a manifestation of the same. This happens during the landfall of a cyclone. This was a very severe cyclonic storm. Whoever has clicked it, kudos to them.".
The same clip was previously viral on Facebook with the caption when translated from Bangla reads, "At this moment horrible destruction happening in Odisha, any moment it can hit West Bengal too"
Click here to view, and here for an archive.
(In Bangla - এই মুহূর্তে উড়িষ্যাতে ইয়াসের ভয়ংকর তান্ডব, যেকোনো মুহূর্তে আছড়ে পড়তে পারে বাংলায়।)
Viral on Facebook
On searching with the same caption on Facebook, we found that the viral clip is being shared with the false claim.
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FACT-CHECK
BOOM found that the footage broadcasted by ABP Ananda has been online since May 2016 and is from the town of Dolores in western Uruguay.
On performing a reverse search using keyframes of the footage, we found that the clip was uploaded to YouTube on May 30, 2016. The 31-second video is titled in Spanish, "Tornado pains, captured from a business."
We spotted old comments from multiple users below that video stating that the tornado scene in from Dolores, Uruguay.
A closer look at the YouTube video, one can spot "BBVA" written in English on a store hoarding. BBVA is a Spanish banking and finance company. We searched for the BBVA banking branch in Dolores, Uruguay, on Street View on Google Maps and found that both the locations match.
Below is a comparison of the 2016 YouTube video (left) and Google Street View of the BBVA branch in Dolores, Uruguay (right) on Google Maps.
CNN had reported in April 2016, that four people were killed and more than 100 were injured in the devastating tornado in Uruguay at that time. The video was uploaded to YouTube the following month.
The same clip had previously gone viral on social media in 2017 falsely claiming that it showed a scene from the impact of Hurricane Irma. BuzzFeed News had then fact-checked the viral clip.
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