An old video showing cars on a highway being rattled by a powerful earthquake in Tokyo, Japan in 2011 is being shared online claiming it is from the recent devastating earthquake that hit Türkiye and Syria on Monday.
Three quakes of 7.8, 7.6 and 6.0, hit Turkey’s southern regions on February 6, 2023, causing widespread destruction in Turkey and in neighboring Syria. Another 5.6 tremor struck on Tuesday as well. The death toll at the time of writing this fact-check was reported to be around 4,983 people.
Several old videos of earthquakes are being recycled against this backdrop.
The viral video appears to be shot from the dashboard of a car and shows the cars ahead of it shake violently as tremors hit the area. The timestamp on the video has been blurred out.
The video is being shared with the caption, "Turkey Earthquake May Allah forgive all our Sins Ameeen"
The same video is being widely shared with the false claim on Facebook.
FACT-CHECK
BOOM found that the viral video is from Shutoko Metropolitan Expressway in Tokyo city, Japan during the infamous March 3, 2011 earthquake that hit the country. It is not from Türkiye during the recent devastating quake as claimed on social media.
Breaking the video into keyframes and running a reverse image search using Google Lens, we found that the search results showed an article in Japanese that stated that the footage of the dash cam of the car is from the March 11, 2011 earthquake that had hit Japan. It is reported to be the most powerful earthquake recorded in Japan which triggered a Tsunami back then.
The article dated May 5, 2022, cited a YouTube which match the visuals seen in the viral video. This YouTube video was uploaded in February 2019. The caption when translated from Japanese reads, "Metropolitan Expressway Route 6 at the time of the 3.11 earthquake Part 3"
In this video, we can see that the car dash cam has the time stamp and date mentioned on it which has been edited out of the viral video. The date reads, "March 11, 2011, at 2.49 pm."
The date and time mentioned also match the recorded time of the earthquake that hit Japan back then. Additionally, the coordinates also mentioned - 35* 41* 49.47* N, 139* 47* 29.78* E" can be geo-located to Japan.
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The location that has been mentioned - Metropolitan Expressway Route 6 is in Tokyo, Japan, and on checking the same route on YouTube with public videos available, we found that the geographical features like the buildings on this road and the street design match with the highway seen in the viral video.
Additionally, the same YouTube channel uploaded two other videos back in 2019, which have the same date stamp of March 2011 from the same location that shows the sequence of events playing out before the viral video starts.