Claim: A video doing the rounds on social media shows a glimpse of a BRT Peshawar Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) station flooded following a recent bout of heavy rain in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), Pakistan.
Fact: The video in question is actually from September 2020 and shows a subway in New York flooded following Hurricane Ida.
Fact or Fiction?
On 21 July 2022, Twitter user Ali Akbar (@AliGunjai) posted a video on Twitter claiming that it shows a Peshawar BRT station submerged in water due to the recent rain spell in KPK.
بارش میں ایوارڈ یافتہ بی آر ٹی سٹشن کی اک جھلک ! pic.twitter.com/gcPK4oYhMH
— Ali Akbar (@AliGunjai) July 21, 2022
The tweet reads, “بارش میں ایوارڈ یافتہ بی آر ٹی سٹشن کی اک جھلک ! [A glimpse of the award-winning BRT station in the rain].”
Journalist Asma Shirazi retweeted the video with the caption, “یہ پشاور کے مناظر ہیں ، کراچی ہو یا پشاور یہ مناظر تکلیف دہ ہیں [These are scenes from Peshawar. Be it Karachi or Peshawar, this is painful]”, but later deleted the post.
The video in question was also picked up by other profiles and pages on Facebook, including here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
Soch Fact Check found the claim to be misleading after searching key frames with Google Lens which revealed that multiple websites including here, here and here carried the video on 2 September 2020. The articles state that the video shows the flooding of a subway station in New York in 2020 due to massive rainfall caused by Hurricane Ida.
The Daily Express’ article included screenshots from the video and credited the images to ‘Dr. Lucky Tran/Twitter’.
Soch Fact Check ran a Google search with the key words ‘Dr. Lucky Tran/Twitter Hurricane Ida causes flooding in New York subway’ and found that the video was shared from Tran’s verified Twitter account on the same date, 2 September 2020. “New York is flooding again,” his tweet reads.
New York is flooding again pic.twitter.com/4zX1dfoFU4
— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran) September 2, 2021
Virality
Soch Fact Check conducted a CrowdTangle analysis for the seven-day period leading up to 26 July 2022 using the following search term:
- بارش میں ایوارڈ یافتہ بی آر ٹی سٹشن کی اک جھلک [A glimpse of the award-winning BRT station in the rain]
The search term turned up 178 interactions across three posts.
The analysis showed that True News’ post is performing 2.08x better than other similar posts with 28 likes, 44 shares and 1,200 views.
On Twitter, the video was shared here, here, here, here, here and here.
Conclusion: The viral video in question does not show a BRT station in Peshawar submerged in water due to recent heavy rain in KPK. The video is from September 2020 and shows the flooding of a subway station in New York due to Hurricane Ida.