Video of a Landslide in Indonesia Falsely Portrayed as Hatton in Sri Lanka

With the south-west monsoon condition gradually establishing over the country, Meteorology Department has announced several landslide warnings over the past few weeks regarding heavy rainfall. Vehicular movement along the Hatton-Colombo main road was temporarily hampered on 19^th May due to the collapse of an earth embankment in Watawala, Hatton and video footages related to the incident were shared widely.

In this context, we noticed a video has been shared by multiple Facebook profiles and pages claiming it to be the video of landslide in Hatton, Sri Lanka. Below is such a claim which was shared among Tamil users

Facebook Link | Archived Link

A Page called T Kada Bench posted this video with the caption: “Hatton ல் ஏற்பட்ட மண்சரிவு” translated to English as “Landslide in Hatton.” on 21^st May 2020

Same video was shared by Facebook user Samanthi Rahapakse as well, with the claim “Hatton Colombo road @ Diyagala please be careful and safe”

Facebook Link | Archived Link

Fact Check

Close inspection of the video revealed that the language spoken in the video is neither Tamil or Sinhala, the most common languages of the hill city claimed to be Hatton in Sri Lanka.

We took a screenshot from the video and did a Google Reverse Image search and found the video to be from Indonesia. Simple keyword search on YouTube led us to a verified news report published by Metro Tv News on 10th April 2020. As per this report, the viral video shows a landslide in the settlements of Chiangjur & Sukanagara in Indonesia. The incident occurred on 9th April 2020.

We noticed that the same video had been attributed to Shillong ,Meghalaya in India as well and Factcrescendo India Team debunked the claim as well.

Factcrescendo India

We also inspected the news reports and images related to the actual landslide which had occurred on Hatton-Colombo main road and noticed that the location was different from the viral video as well. Below is a video of the actual landslide in Hatton reported on 19^th May.

Conclusion:

From our investigation, we found that the posts sharing this video are out of context. The video claimed to be of a landslide in Hatton is originally from the settlements of Cianjur in Indonesia.