Buddha Statue “Surviving” Nepal’s Recent Floods? The Viral Video Is Old – From 2024

When a sudden flash flood tore down the Bhote Koshi River on the Nepal-Tibet border, after a glacier had collapsed, unleashing a surge of water onto the valleys below, the results were devastating. Several hundred people had been confirmed dead, and hundreds more were still missing as of 27 August 2026.

As international feeds were filled with news of the disaster, one clip stood out: a golden Buddha statue said to be standing untouched while the floodwaters raged around it, shared by many as a sign that the statue had been miraculously spared. Here are the posts that carried the claim.

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Social Media Posts:

A video appearing to show a Buddha statue untouched by Nepal’s floodwaters drew heavy attention online. The posts said the devastating floods in Nepal’s Rasuwa region had wrecked homes, roads, and infrastructure, yet the statue had come through unharmed, and many shared the footage as a miracle seen through the lens of religious faith.

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The video continued to circulate widely across social media with captions such as “Nepal Floods: Buddha Statue Stands Amid Raging Narayani River”

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Some mainstream outlets had also run the video as footage of the recent floods reaching this statue.

We set out to separate fact from fiction.

Fact-Check:

The statue in the video is a Gautama Buddha statue that stands near the Narayani River in Narayangadh, Chitwan, in southern Nepal.

Because the clip was being shared as footage of the current floods, we set out to trace where it actually came from. We ran the video’s frames through a reverse image search, and the same footage turned out to have been reported by news outlets back in 2024.

The same footage was reported during Nepal’s July 2024 floods

Comparing the video now circulating with the one reported in 2024, the colour tones, the camera angle, and the way the water rushes past the statue are all identical.

In the first week of July 2024, sustained monsoon rains set off flooding and landslides across Nepal. Two passenger buses carrying 65 people were swept away by heavy rain and landslides in the Simaltal area of Chitwan district. Reports on that flooding are available here and here. A photograph of floodwaters in the Narayani River at Narayangadh, Chitwan, striking the base of the Buddha statue was also published on 7 July 2024. Facebook Facebook

Nepali journalists confirm the viral footage as old; Buddha Statue was not submerged in recent devastating flash floods

To get a localised context, we reached out to a Kathmandu-based investigative journalist, Deepak Adhikari, who identified the footage as old scenes at first glance, yet linked us with Ramesh Kumar Paudel, a Narayangadh-based journalist working with Kantipur Daily, Nepal’s most widely read Nepali-language daily newspaper.

Ramesh confirmed that he himself had filmed footage of the same scenes currently going viral, back in 2024, and had posted it on his social media. His Facebook post from 2024 can be seen below, which shows the same scenery.

Ramesh added that the water level at the statue during the recent flash floods had stayed far lower and shared a photograph of the actual level captured yesterday, 26^th August, which he had also published in the Kantipur Daily.

Furthermore, Umesh Shrestha, editor at Nepal Fact Check, also confirmed the viral footage as old and shared a Facebook live video filmed by local journalist Pratima Silwal from Chitwan on 26th August, the day of the devastating flash floods. This footage also shows the Buddha statue as unaffected by the recent floods in Nepal.

By the time the water reached the statue in Chitwan, the level had dropped

According to Chitwan’s chief district officer, although a severe risk had been declared for the district, its urban areas escaped major flooding because the Narayani had not crossed the danger mark by the time it reached the city. The river at Devghat is treated as dangerous once it passes 9 metres, but the floodwater arriving from upstream peaked at just 6.57 to 6.80 metres at Chitwan before receding quickly. Further details are here, here and here.

The August 2026 floods hit hardest at the epicentre, Rasuwagadhi, on the Tibet border, roughly 114 km (straight line) from the Buddha statue in Chitwan, which sits far downstream on the same Bhotekoshi–Trishuli–Narayani river system.

As the map below shows, Rasuwagadhi, the epicentre and the location of the Buddha statue, lies on the same downstream river system; the two locations are widely apart. The disaster struck far upstream near the Tibet border, well over 100 km from the statue in Chitwan.

What actually happened in Nepal’s August 2026 floods

On 26 August 2026, a massive ice-and-rock avalanche broke off a glacierised slope on the Nepal-Tibet border, high above the Lhende Khola. The US Geological Survey first recorded the event as a magnitude 4.4 earthquake and later reclassified it as a magnitude 5.2 landslide, the tremor having come from the collapse itself rather than a tectonic quake. The debris first crashed into the Lhende Khola on the Tibetan side and briefly formed a natural dam. Within minutes it gave way under the pressure, sending a wall of water roughly 10 metres high surging down into the valley below.

The floodwaters submerged the Gyirong Port trade hub in Tibet’s Shigatse region near the Chinese border, then swept through the Lhende Khola, Bhote Koshi and Trishuli rivers, devastating the Syafrubesi and Timure settlements in Nepal’s Rasuwa district and damaging homes, farmland, and infrastructure along the riverbanks in Nuwakot and Dhading. The surge carried on downstream along the Trishuli and finally reached the Narayani, one of Nepal’s principal rivers.

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Conclusion:

Our fact-check finds that the video shared as proof of a Buddha statue surviving Nepal’s recent floods is misleading. The footage is old, filmed during Nepal’s July 2024 floods, and not from the disaster of August 2026.

The statue stands near the Narayani River in Chitwan. While the 2026 floods did reach the Narayani, the water level had fallen back below the danger threshold by the time it arrived at Chitwan, so the city and the statue were never overwhelmed. This was confirmed by a photograph around the Buddha statue, provided by Ramesh Kumar Paudel, a Narayangadh journalist.