The clip was shared after at least 108 people were killed when heavy monsoon rains caused landslides to devastate tea plantations in Wayanad district in the southern Indian coastal state of Kerala before dawn (archived link).

Another 128 people were taken to hospital for treatment after being rescued from mud and debris.

The district is famous for its tea plantations, which stretch across the hilly landscape and rely on large numbers of casual labourers for cultivation and harvesting.

The same video, along with similar claims, was shared elsewhere on X here and here.

But the footage circulating online is time-stamped as June 16 and was shared in online news at least a month before the Wayanad disaster.

Floods in Meizhou

A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the mistakenly shared video resulted in a longer version of the same footage posted on June 25 by a YouTube channel that regularly posts clips of natural disasters and extreme weather events (archived link).

The clip is titled: “June 16, 2024 – Meizhou, Guangdong, China – Time lapse of a severe flood.”

AFP reported on June 26, citing official sources (archived link), that at least 38 people had died in heavy rains and flooding around the city of Meizhou.

Below you can see a screenshot comparison of the video used in the fake posts (left) and the YouTube video (right):

In the upper right corner of the video is the logo of Qiaoan CCTV, a surveillance camera manufacturer based in Guangdong (archived link).

A subsequent post with a search term was also shared on Chinese social media platforms, including on Bilibili on June 26, where it was captioned “Floods in Meizhou, Guangdong” (archived link).

Further searching found the same video in Chinese-language reports here and here about the Meizhou flooding (archived links here and here).