FACT CHECK: Old and unrelated video shared as Cyclone Burevi in Sri Lanka

Cyclone Burevi hit the north-eastern coast of Sri Lanka on the night of 2^nd December and gradually moved west towards the Bay of Bengal on the following day, without causing extensive damage. 

Earlier Department of Meteorology along with Disaster Management Center had issued several warnings for heavy rains accompanied with strong winds especially to the people in the risk zones in Northern parts of the island. 

In this context, we found a viral video being shared on social media platform claiming to be of Cyclone Burevi. However, our investigation revealed that the video was not a recent one and related to an incident, which had happened several years ago. 

SOCIAL MEDIA REPORTS:

A Twitter user named Chamalka shared this video as seen below along with the text #CycloneBurevi.

Tweet

Archived

A Facebook page called “The Video Collection” also streamed the video live on their newsfeed captioned: “The Burevi Cyclone | burevi cyclone in Sri Lanka | most popular cyclones Sri Lanka..Be careful and share this😢” giving the impression that the incident had happened recently.

Facebook | Archived

However, many of the comments under these posts said the video was fake. Others said the video seems to be of a funnel cloud more than a cyclone or a tornado. 

Fact Check 

We began our investigation with a Google reverse image search, which clearly revealed that the video had been shared for several years on multiple occasions. 

In 2016, a video titled ‘Tornado sri lanka’ was uploaded on YouTube, which can be seen below: 

Further, we discovered that the same video was used in several prior false posts claiming to be a tornado in India. The claim has been debunked by several Indian fact-checkers in 2017 

We inspected the video closely and identified the location to be a Damro Showroom in Wadduwa. Below is the Google Street view of the same location, which clarifies the video, was indeed shot in Wadduwa near Kaluthara.

Google Maps

Conclusion 

Our investigations reveal that the video shared claiming to be of the Burevi cyclone is in fact a video taken several years ago of a funnel cloud in Wadduwa.