Old videos shared falsely as recent earthquake and tsunami warning in Alaska

Context

In the late hours of July 15, 2023, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Alaska, leading to a tsunami advisory being issued. CBS News reported that people of Kodiak, Alaska, heard sirens warning about a possible tsunami. But the advisory was canceled an hour later as the National Weather Service in Anchorage, Alaska, downgraded the tsunami warning, stating it only applied to coastal Alaska and that Kodiak Island and the Kenai Peninsula were not expected to be impacted.

Following this, on July 16, a video of an earthquake and one of a siren playing amid a tsunami warning were shared on social media, with captions claiming to show the July 15 incident. One video, about 20 seconds long that appears to be filmed from a rooftop, shows many houses and a dusky sky as a siren sounds a tsunami warning. The second video is 45 seconds long and is purportedly a recent news report by Inside Edition that includes a montage of earthquake videos. Archived posts can be found here, here, here, and here. 

However, both these videos are old and not from July 2023.

In Fact

Our reverse image search on the keyframes of both viral videos led us to old videos unrelated to the recent earthquake in Alaska. The first video has existed on the internet since at least July 2021, and the second video was an actual Inside Edition news report from November 2018.

The oldest upload of this video that we could find was to TikTok on July 29, 2021. The caption for the video reads "Tsunami sirens in Kodiak after the 8.2 earthquake," with hashtags related to earthquakes and Kodiak. We found a CNBC News reported on the same date, stating that a massive earthquake of 8.2 magnitude struck Alaska, after which tsunami warnings were issued and later canceled. The report said that sirens blared in Seward on the Kenai Peninsula, and residents were told to move to higher ground. On July 30, 2021, Anchorage Daily News reported the canceled tsunami warning and warning sirens heard in Kodiak. The video is old and unrelated to the July 2023 quake in Alaska, as the TikTok video predates the incident.

This is not the first time this video was misattributed to a different earthquake. It was also incorrectly shared as showing Kodiak during an earthquake in November 2021.

We noticed the second video carried the Inside Edition logo on the bottom left corner and found the original, which Inside Edition published on its website on November 30, 2018. The video report is 1 minute 38 seconds long and includes several clips of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit Alaska on the same date. The clips show the quake's effects in a city courtroom, a school classroom, air traffic control, newsrooms, a cracked road, two home security videos, and a person trying to escape their bedroom.

The viral video does not show all these clips; it excludes the clip from inside the courtroom at the beginning and ends in the middle of the first home security video. The U.S. Geological Survey also released a report about the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that rocked south-central Alaska. It added that in the following three days, 170 aftershocks of magnitude 3 or above occurred since the mainshock. 

The Verdict

Two old videos of earthquakes - one featuring a tsunami warning siren from July 2021 and the other from a 2018 news report - are being shared to incorrectly claim that they featured events during the recent earthquake in Alaska. Both videos existed on the internet well before the July earthquake in Alaska and reportedly showed older quakes in the country. Therefore, we have marked the claim false.