News24 | Durban beach clip wrongly shared as Russian tsunami disaster

A viral video claimed to show a deadly tsunami triggered by a record-breaking earthquake in Russia’s Far East. It is instead footage of an unusually high tide from Durban in 2017.

• An 8.8-magnitude quake hit Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula on 30 July, sparking tsunami warnings across the Pacific.
• A viral video falsely claimed to show waves from the quake, but was filmed in Durban years earlier.
• Reverse image searches and local news reports confirmed the footage showed high tides in South Africa, not Russia.

“A powerful tsunami hits Russia, sea waves over 13 feet high enter Russia,” reads a Sinhala-language Facebook post shared hours after the 8.8 magnitude jolt struck off the coast of Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula (archived link).

The tremor was the region’s strongest since 1952, the regional seismic monitoring service said.

Storm surges of up to four metres (12 feet) were predicted for some parts of the Pacific with more than a dozen nations - from Japan to the United States to Ecuador - evacuating citizens from coastal regions.

The warnings were later lifted, allowing millions of temporary evacuees to return home.

The only reported fatality was a woman killed when her car fell off a cliff in Japan as she tried to escape, local media reported.

The post featured a video of waves crashing onto the shore as people flee from the beach.

Similar posts were also shared by users from India, Pakistan, and the Philippines but the footage does not show a tsunami hitting Russia.

A reverse image search on Google surfaced multiple YouTube posts sharing the clip in March 2017 (archived here and here). The posts say it shows a beach in the coastal city of Durban.

Local media outlets eNCA and Southlands Sun reported that the beaches were closed due to the high tides at the time (archived here and here).

Using details from the news reports, AFP was able to confirm the location of the video by comparing it with Google Maps street imagery of a beach in Durban.

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