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Chilling video of passengers rescued from flooded van NOT from #NairobiRains

This article is more than 5 years old

In the video, a white van is marooned in a gully, about to be completely overrun by flood water. Bystanders throw out ropes to its terrified passengers, as they haul them to safety one by one. It is a heart-stopping moment, as you desperately will each passenger to successfully clamber back to safety.



The Twitter handle @KenyanTraffic twice shared this clip to its close to 350,000 followers on 15 March 2018 while relentless rain was pounding the country. It claimed the incident had happened in the southwestern town of Ngong, which is close to the capital Nairobi.

But the video is not of flooding in Kenya, which has left major cities like Nairobi under water. We actually fact-checked it before, when it was said to be of a huge storm in the South African city of Durban in October 2017.

Putting the video’s address through two free video verification tools - Amnesty International’s Youtube DataViewer and the InVID browser plug-in - showed that it first showed up online in June 2017.

While it is said to be of an incident in Arsi, Ethiopia, we could not verify this. We can safely conclude that it is not of the ongoing heavy rains in Kenya, though. -15/03/2018

 

Additional reading:

https://africacheck.org/spot-check/terrifying-video-minibus-taxi-swept-away-flood-not-sas-durbanstorm/

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