Disaster Fact Checks

FALSE: Photos showing rivers of animal blood due to forest fires

Rappler.com

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FALSE: Photos showing rivers of animal blood due to forest fires
The incidents in the photos are not related to each other
Claim:

Intentional forest fires caused rivers and floods to be filled with the blood of animals, according to a viral post on Facebook.

Facebook user Is La Mic posted a set of 6 photos on Wednesday, October 7, and captioned it with this claim.

The post had over 24,000 shares, 19,000 reactions, and 496 comments as of writing. Claim Check, Facebook’s monitoring tool, flagged the post after it was reported at least 94 times for containing false information. 

Rating: FALSE
The facts:

The photos posted by user Is La Mic were not related to each other. The forest fires in the images happened years after the photos of the red river and floods were taken. The incidents also took place in countries far from each other.

A reverse image search showed that the two photos of the forest fire were taken in Australia in December 2019. The images were included in news reports from Canadian Global Television Network’s Global News and British newspaper Daily Mail.

Meanwhile, the 3 photos supposedly showing rivers and floods of blood were taken in two countries: Russia and Bangladesh.

One was a photo of the Daldykan river in September 2016. British news agency The Guardian reported that the suspected cause of the incident was a possible chemical spill due to a pipeline break because the river is situated near the nickel-producing Arctic city of Norilsk – not because of blood.

The other two photos were taken in Bangladesh and have been available online as early as 2017. The red flood in the photos shows a mix of animal blood and floodwater in parts of Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital.

British broadcaster BBC explained in a report in 2016 that there is blood on Dhaka streets almost every year because many slaughter their livestock on the road as part of the Eid’l Adha celebrations, but heavy rains make the situation look worse.

Lastly, the photo of burnt animals was an image of dead sheep that died during a bushfire in New South Wales back in 2014. The original photo was used by The Guardian in this report. – Pauline Macaraeg/Rappler.com

Keep us aware of suspicious Facebook pages, groups, accounts, websites, articles, or photos in your network by contacting us at factcheck@rappler.com. Let us battle disinformation one Fact Check at a time.

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