This video was not recorded during the fires in the Brazilian Amazon 2019
The video circulates since at least August 2018, before Jair Bolsonaro was president.
(Web Desk) – A video that shows a helicopter throwing incandescent material while flying over a burning forest has millions of reproductions on social networks, with the claim that the Brazilian government burns the forests of the Amazon. But it is false: the video circulates since at least August 2018, before Jair Bolsonaro was president, and the images were originally shared in Canada.
"IMPACTING VIDEO. SO THAT THE GOVERNMENT OF BOLSONARO PRESIDENT OF BRAZIL IS BURNING THE FORESTS OF THE AMAZON, " say most of the publications that show the video, with hundreds of thousands of views between Facebook, YouTube and Twitter .
The video also circulated in Portuguese.
In the images, filmed from an aircraft, it is observed for a minute how a helicopter that flies over a forest area in flames seems to throw more incandescent material on the trees.
At first glance, it might seem the cause of the fire, but our investigation showed that it was just looking for the opposite.
AFP Factual first conducted a reverse search * with the InVid tool , which produced results with the same video since the end of August 2018. Therefore, the video is not current, and does not coincide with the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, which It started on January 1, 2019.
Among other results obtained through InVid, the TinEye search engine threw a publication in French that explained next to the same video that the helicopter used a method known among firefighters called "back burn" or "back fire", "to contain the fire " which, according to this publication, was produced " in California."
And at first glance, the vegetation that was observed in the viral video - with the appearance of conifers - does not resemble what is present in the Amazon.
A new search on Google before August 27, 2018 with the keywords "helicopter" + "fire" (fire, in English) yielded another English name for that technique: "heli torch".
Finally, a search on Facebook with the Who Posted What tool , before August 27, 2018, led us to a publication on August 22 of that year, from a private helicopter company called Arduini Helicopters, which operates in the province of Columbia British, in western Canada.
Among the comments, a user named Tom Arduini congratulates a person named Paul Buxton-Carr " for this impressive recording ." A day later, the same company reiterates the congratulations.
The AFP tried to contact the company to confirm the origin and date of the recording, without response until the moment of publication.
Paul Buxton-Carr is interviewed by media such as The New York Timesor CBS as a pilot of British Columbia and even received a decorationfrom the government of that province for his work.
The AFP did not find previous records of the video on the internet, so they do not show current fires, and they are not located in the Amazon, or in California, but the recording was originally shared in Canada.
Fight fire with fire? It is a technique
Firefighters from various parts of the world resort to the creation of the so-called "fire lines" when "heat and smoke impede the work of personnel, if the terrain is steep, if the vegetation is dense, if the spread is rapid , if there is emission of peas, if the front is very wide and in fires of glasses. In general, when the direct attack is not possible ", describes the National Forestry Corporation of Chile (Conaf).
This technique allows, as detailed by Conaf itself, a safer and more lasting fight against fires, but brings the sacrifice of vegetation as a disadvantage.
"The fire is used to burn vegetation in wider areas and creating a fire that manages to advance against the fire, burning the fuel in the path that, due to its behavior, the fire takes. When the two fires meet the fire is extinguished by lack of combustible vegetation It is an extreme resource, given the probability that it is unmanageable and that complicates the situation, "clarifies the organism .
And in the Amazon, is this technique used?
Asked by the AFP verification team, the press office of the Fire Department of the state of Amazonas replied: " In the Amazon, we have not resorted to this technique with a helicopter. We use a container, a device we call a burner [NDLR: ‘pinga-fogo’, the size of a jug, with fuel that spreads little by little] , but it is something local. And what do we do? If an area is burning, we go a little further, we clean the ground, until the earth itself, so that nothing is ignitable from the point we clean. We burn before the fire arrives. It is a safe burning so that the fire does not have more fuel, which is dry vegetation.
And therefore, it goes out ".
The agency added, about the use of these devices to fight fires in the Amazon, that "there is no need, there is no precision when using the helicopter" and that they were probably used in larger areas. "I never saw this in Brazil," the advisory concluded in reference to the viral video.
In short, the viral video was originally published in August 2018, several months before the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro began in Brazil, and the images were initially shared in Canada, far from the Amazon, where the techniques of " line of fire "to fight fires.
