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| - Fact Check: Neither Assam nor Australia, this shocking 2021 video shows an old Indonesian bridge getting destroyed during floods
A viral video of a metal bridge collapsing and flowing away during a flood has no connection with the ongoing floods in Assam. It is actually a 2021 video showing an old Indonesian bridge getting destroyed.
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India Today Fact Check
This video has no connection with the ongoing Assam flood. It shows an old bridge from Sumba Island in Indonesia that collapsed and drifted away with strong currents during a flood on April 4, 2021.
As the flood situation in Assam continues to deteriorate, a shocking video of a metal bridge collapsing and flowing away with a flooding river is making rounds on social media.
Media reports, including Odisha TV, a Bhubaneswar-based news channel shared this video with the claim that it was shot during the ongoing pre-monsoon floods and landslides in Assam. Aaj Tak and India Today also initially reported the video to be from Assam but later retracted the story.
Alt News tried to “fact-check” these misreporting from other media houses but themselves ended up concluding wrongly that this video was from Australia. The archived version of that report can be seen here. However, it later modified the story, including the headline.
The India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found that the video was neither from Assam nor from Australia. It was from the April 2021 floods in Sumba Island in Indonesia.
Archived versions of posts with similar claims can be seen here and here.
AFWA Probe
While investigating the claim, we conducted a reverse search of the keyframes of the video, which led us to a YouTube video shared on April 5, 2021, by Tribunnews.com, the online news portal of Tribun Network, an Indonesian media group.
The video description in the Indonesian language said it was of an old bridge in Kambaniru, East Sumba, an island in southern Indonesia, that collapsed due to floods.
Subsequent searches led us to more Indonesian news reports that contained either the video or stills of this bridge’s collapse. These reports, too, confirmed that the bridge was located in the East Sumba Regency of Indonesia and had historical significance. Reportedly, the bridge collapsed on April 4, 2021.
The bridge’s present condition
To get a better idea of what happened, we decided to get in touch with locals and contacted a journalist named Ryan Nong, the Tribun News correspondent for East Sumba regency.
Confirming that these were indeed visuals from an old bridge on the Kambaniru River in East Sumba, Nong sent us recent photos of the location.
The wreckage of this bridge could still be seen floating in the Khambaniru River in the photos sent by Nong. Nong told India Today that he covered the collapse of this bridge on April 4, 2021.
Old satellite photos from Google Earth also confirmed that this bridge was washed away during the flood somewhere between November 2020 and April 2021. The latest images show that the bridge is yet to be reconstructed.
What the government said
India Today got in touch with the Public Works Donation officer of East Sumba regency, Sekdis Vhian Takandjandji. He confirmed that this video collapsed in his regency and added a new bridge was not built because there was another bridge nearby.
With these multiple pieces of evidence, we concluded that his video was neither from Assam nor from Australia. It was an old bridge from Indonesia that collapsed and drifted away during a flood in April 2021.
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