We can conclude: that photo isn’t AI-generated. You can’t get an AI system to generate photos of an existing location; it’s just not possible given the current state of the art.

That's a poor conclusion. A similar image could be created using masks and AI inpainting. You could take a photo on a rainy day and add in the disaster components using GenAI.

That's definitely not the case in this scenario, but we shouldn't rely on things like verifying real-world locations to assume that GenAI wasn't involved in making a photo.