Claim: A video shows fish flopping around in a few inches of water in a supermarket after rainfall that led to unprecedented flooding in Dubai in April 2024.
Fact: The video does not depict Dubai and is unrelated to the April 2024 flooding. It is actually from 2018 when an aquarium reportedly shattered in a supermarket in Tbilisi, Georgia.
On 17 April 2024, Facebook user ‘Mallang Jaan’ posted a video showing fish flopping around in a supermarket, with the following caption:
“Oh no no 😭😭 #unitedarabemirates #dubailife”
While the caption does not explicitly state that the footage shows a supermarket in Dubai, the hashtags and the tagged location in the post make it clear that the poster is claiming it shows the aftermath of the recent flash floods in Dubai. The video further shows staff at the supermarket trying to catch the stranded fish with nets.
Terming the storms and flooding an “exceptional event recorded in its climatic history”, the UAE’s National Center of Meteorology (NCM) said the country “witnessed the largest amounts of rainfall during the past 75 years”.
“Nearly 4 inches (100 mm) of rain fell over the course of just 12 hours on Tuesday, according to weather observations at the airport – around what Dubai usually records in an entire year,” CNN reported, quoting data by the United Nations (UN), and linked it to “human-driven climate change”.
According to the World Weather Attribution (WWA), a group of scientists who investigate extreme weather events, the heavy rains were “most likely” made worse by “global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions”, Al Jazeera wrote in a news report.
By 19 April, four people were reported dead, as per Arab News.
“Heavy rain also fell in Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Oman,” The Guardian reported.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check ran keyframes from the viral video in reverse image search engines and found that the clip is entirely unrelated to the Dubai floods.
The keyframes matched images in a 6 February 2018 report, titled “Broken tank fills grocery store aisle with flopping fish,” by American news agency United Press International (UPI), which wrote:
“A shopper at a Georgian grocery store captured video of an aisle filled with flopping fish after an aquarium shattered.”
The footage was filmed in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, the publication added. The same video, which appears on the YouTube channel ViralHog, is embedded in the report. The clip’s description, which mentions that the incident occurred on 2 February 2018, states, “At shopping time, suddenly the aquarium broke. All fishes [sic] were on the floor. Working personnel were trying to save the fish.”
This is further corroborated by a video posted on 3 February 2018 on the YouTube channel georgianborat, with the title “Fish swim on Carrefour supermarket hypermarket store floor in Tbilisi, Georgia viral video.”
Multiple news outlets, such as The Daily Mirror, Infobae, and Daily Mail’s website, MailOnline, also reported on the same.
Virality
Soch Fact Check found that the video has spread to multiple platforms, with some of the most viral ones shared here, here and here, respectively garnering over 261,600, 58,000, and 32,400 views.
The clip was also shared here, here, and here on Facebook. It was posted here and here on Instagram.
The footage was shared with the false claim here, here, and here on YouTube. It was also posted on TikTok here, here, and here.
The clip was also shared here on LinkedIn.
Conclusion: The video does not depict Dubai and is unrelated to the April 2024 flooding. It is actually from 2018 when an aquarium reportedly shattered in a supermarket in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Background image in cover photo: Omar Yehia
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