As torrential rains slammed central parts of the US state of Texas and the death toll from the resulting floods grew into the dozens over the weekend, rumours started to spread online about a sliver of good news.

Two girls had allegedly been found alive in a tree near Comfort, Texas.

Louis Amestoy, editor of The Kerr County Lead, was sceptical, but the messages he was getting about the miraculous rescue would not stop, he said. A ground report on social media from a volunteer seemed to corroborate the story. After sending a reporter out to investigate and hearing from what he said were multiple self-described witnesses, the Lead ran the story on July 6, which was subsequently shared both locally and nationally.

But the story was not true; “100% inaccurate”, as a local sheriff put it.

On Facebook, thousands of people had seen the story, with many expressing hope, gratitude and relief. Those hopes were crushed when Amestoy was forced to retract the story. Like other disasters before it, the floods had attracted fast-spreading misinformation and served as a warning about the vigilance required of journalists during emotionally charged news events.

After the story was debunked, many Facebook pages and accounts, including verified ones, deleted or updated their original posts sharing the unverified report. Yet some posts with the initial reports, including one with 4,700 shares, remained unchanged as of Monday evening.

Story based on fake witnesses

Flash floods starting July 4 in central Texas have killed more than 100 people, according to news reports. Though officials have discouraged people from interfering with rescue operations, that did not stop volunteers from showing up, Amestoy said.

When a reporter for the Lead, Jennifer Dean, went to the scene of the supposed rescue, “volunteer firefighters” and other community members recounted the story about the two girls as proof of their efforts, Amestoy said.

“You had so much enthusiasm in that community for that story. So many people were telling us that they saw the situation,” Amestoy said. “We literally had eyewitnesses.”

Dean spoke to some 20 to 30 people in Comfort, all of whom told similar versions of the story, Amestoy said. Dean could not be reached for comment. A few even took her to the site of the made-up rescue, Amestoy said.

Amestoy decided that they had enough sourcing to publish the story. However, he did not reach out to local officials for comment because he anticipated that they would not confirm the rescue even if it was true. He said he had accurately reported on previous incidents related to the flood without the help of officials, who tended to wait until news conferences to release information, thanks to his sourcing.

“You know you’re not going to get a confirmation from officials,” Amestoy said. “So even if I was to reach out, I knew what the answer was going to be, which is probably part of my problem too.”

The initial story, just five paragraphs long, cited nameless “witnesses” and “sources on the ground”. Busy reporting on other flood-related news, Amestoy said he intended to later update the story with more extensive details, like the names of sources. But just a few hours later, Kerr County Sheriff Larry L Leitha informed him that the story was not true. Amestoy retracted the article.

“Like everyone, we wanted this story to be true, but it’s a classic tale of misinformation that consumes all of us during a natural disaster. Unfortunately, the story is not true and we are retracting it,” reads the editor’s note Amestoy attached to the top of the story.

Kelly McBride, Poynter senior vice president and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership, said it is important that reporters make clear to their sources that they plan to name and quote them in their stories.

“It puts the people on notice that they are actually going to be held accountable for the information that they’re telling you. So if they are trying to inflate their role in something, that may cause them to think twice about that,” McBride said. “If they are exaggerating something or suggesting that they saw something firsthand that they only heard about second- or thirdhand, it brings a little bit of accountability.”

McBride added that it is important that newsrooms do a postmortem and review their reporting process after making an error this serious. Amestoy, who described his newsroom as a “one-man show” in which he does much of the reporting with help from volunteers, said he trusts Dean’s reporting because he heard many of the same things — alleged firsthand accounts — from his sources.

“If this were a larger operation, you would be doing an investigation to figure out what happened, right?” McBride said. “And you would be asking the reporter for their notes and the list of everybody that they talk to, and a third person would come behind because it’s so serious that you would want to see where everything broke down.”

Volunteer’s ground report goes viral on Facebook

One of the earliest versions of the narrative came from Cord Shiflet, a volunteer cleaning up debris. In his now-unavailable Facebook live video on Sunday, a copy of which was shared on X, he said, “We just got news that two girls were found 27 feet up in a tree, alive. They’ve been holding on for over a day. And they found them 6 miles downriver.”

Later that day, Shiflet posted a video apologising for sharing the story, saying the information came from Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officials. “I don’t know their capacity. I don’t know their name, but [they have] DPS shirts with their badges and guns and radio communications,” he said, adding that he heard it from a Kerr County official, too.

“If I was wrong or am wrong, I want to deeply, deeply apologise. I never want to sensationalise any type of story and just want to share the facts,” he said. “When someone as these guys are getting intel all day and telling us what’s going on out in the field, when you get information like that from a DPS officer, whatever you call them, I don’t know what is a more credible source than that.”

We contacted Shiflet, the Texas DPS and the Kerr County government and sheriff’s offices, but no one was willing to speak on the record.

The Economic Times, one of India’s largest economic dailies, and The Kerrville Daily Times also reported the story, citing Shiflet’s live video. Later, in a note clarifying that the story is not true, The Kerrville Daily Times publisher, John Wells, said, apart from Shiflet, “several individuals echoed it, claiming to have firsthand knowledge and reliable sources”. That confidence and the situation’s urgency led them to publish the story, he wrote.

Several high-profile individuals posting updates about the aftermath shared the story. These included meteorologist Collin Myers, who previously worked at CBS and has 148,000 followers. “Please let this be true,” he said. Doug Warner, anchor for KNWA-TV and Fox 24, also shared Shiflet’s account and labelled it as a “report”.

Myers and Warner edited their posts after the Kerr County Lead retracted its story.

Amestoy said he finds it surreal how many people continue to believe the rescue took place even after the retraction.

“We wanted this to be a good story. We wanted something positive to report, and that didn’t happen. And we are apologising and holding ourselves accountable for this mistake.”