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| - Fact Check: Old and CGI videos peddled as devastation caused by recent NY floods
India Today found that several videos allegedly showing chaotic scenes in flood-hit New York City turned out to be misleading.
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India Today Fact Check
None of these clips show the present situation in New York. The clips of the submerged subway stations are old and that of the octopus attacking a car is CGI.
Emergency was declared across New York on September 29 after torrential downpours triggered flash floods in several areas. Amid this, a deluge of videos started making the rounds on social media, allegedly showing the devastation caused by the floods. Of these, two videos were prominently shared by many people. One contained seven different clips of submerged subway stations with water falling from the roofs on trains and gushing through the stations.
The other video featured a giant octopus in a parking garage, climbing atop a car with its tentacles, and then crushing it. Archived versions of these posts can be found here and here.
India Today, in its investigation, found that the clips of the submerged subway stations are old and that of the octopus attacking a car was made using CGI.
Clips of submerged subway stations
A reverse search of keyframes from the viral video led us to a report in The Mirror dated September 2, 2021. According to it, tropical storm Ida battered America’s northeast regions, leading to a state of emergency in New York.
Out of the seven clips, this report carried a screenshot of the video of water falling from the roof on a train and longer versions of two other videos of flood-hit subway stations. The report also stated that the clip of water cascading down the steps was from the Manhattan subway station, while that of a heavy pool of water hitting a train was from the Brooklyn station.
Further searches led us to an Instagram post by Nieves ZuberbuÌhler, a journalist based in New York, which featured all the seven clips in question. The post from September 2, 2021, credited an account named “subwaycreatures” for a few of them. This confirmed that these videos predate the ongoing floods in New York by at least two years.
VIDEO OF GIANT OCTOPUS
We noticed that the viral video contained the watermark “@ghost3dee”. Searching for this led us to a VFX YouTube channel of the same name. According to the channel’s description, the Qatari artist Alex Z running the channel created a CGI octopus character called “Churro”.
On this channel, apart from the viral video of “Churro” attacking a car, we found several other videos of the same CGI octopus loitering in the sand, taking a bath and even changing its colours.
While sharing the viral video on Instagram on September 25, 2023, Alex mentioned that he made the clip using Snap Renderfarm, a high-performance computer system built to render computer-generated images (CGI).
Thus, it is clear that a CGI video of an octopus and old videos of flooded subway stations were wrongly shared as scenes unfolding in flood-hit New York.
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