Video of 2018 California wildfire viral as Amazon forest blaze

With the Amazon fires in Brazil raging incessantly since the beginning of the year, a video has gone viral on social media. The video is 1:55 minutes long, and has been shot from a car travelling through a region engulfed by wild fire. The video clip is in portrait mode, suggesting that it has been shot from a mobile phone.

The video has been posted by several individual users on Twitter and Facebook, with identical text. From the audio, it is apparent that a woman and a child are present in the car while the video is being shot. The child appears to be frightened and can be heard shrieking as the car drives through the smoke-laden freeway, with raging fires on the hills in the backdrop. The language spoken by the two is not English.

The video has also been uploaded to the Alt News app for verification.

CALIFORNIA, NOT AMAZON

Alt News took a frame from the video clip and reverse-searched the same on Google, along with specific keywords. We found an article dated November 14, 2018, on a Russian website which was titled, ‘“Don’t cry. Pray”: how a Ukrainian girl and her daughter escape the California fire (video)‘ (Google translation). The article stated, “At the epicenter of large-scale fires that swept California in the US and claimed the lives of at least 44 people, Ukrainians also found themselves. Girl Caroline Protsenko posted on her Facebook page an emotional video that has garnered 2.5 million views.” (Google translation).

On the basis of this report, Alt News found this video had been posted on Facebook by Karolina Protsenko, a child musical artist of Ukrainian origin with an impressive social media following. The video was posted on November 9, 2018, and has been viewed over 11 million times till now. The language spoken in the video is Russian. The video was posted with the message, “For the first time in my life I felt like we are going to die. We got trapped into the fire 🔥 . Thank you God for saving us 🙏. On this video I speak Russian. Mostly I am just praying. I am too emotional. I am sorry. I just wanted to tell you, Love, Live and be grateful for every day of your life! ❤️”

The blazing fires seen in the video are the wildfires of California of 2018. The fires were the deadliest in the history of the state, with a death toll of over 40 and over 50,000 people displaced. A video of the forest fires in California, USA, uploaded in November 2018, is now being shared as the wildfires of the Amazon forest.