At least 166 people have been killed as Helene left behind a trail of destruction across the southeastern U.S., including Florida, Virginia, North and South Carolina last week. President Joe Biden will visit North and South Carolina to assess the devastation from Hurricane Helene. Amidst this, a video showing a building with a blue roof in a heavy storm is widely circulating on social media. Users claim that this video shows footage of the Hurricane Helene that hit US recently.
The caption of the post states, #BREAKING: Helene is ALREADY down to 942MB (millibars). Hurricane Katrina’s minimum central pressure at landfall was 902MB (millibars). THIS WILL BE THE ONE OF THE LARGEST CATEGORY 5 HURRICANES to hit the U.S. if this continues to drop”.
Let’s check the truth
Fact Check-
We started our investigation by running a reverse image search on Google, whose results led us to the same video posted by Mike Seidel on Twitter on 29 September 2022. He is the weather specialist of Fox News . The caption reads, “We were in the eye wall of Cat. 4 #Hurricane #Ian for over 5 hours and the back side was the worst. I haven’t experienced anything close to this in over 30 years.”
By using this hint, we conducted further searches and found media reports regarding this. On 28 Sept. 28, 2022, Category 4 Hurricane Ian made landfall near Cayo Costa in Lee County, Florida as one of the most powerful storms in U.S. history. Ian brought death and destruction to Fort Myers Beach and Lee County’s other barrier islands as deadly storm surge as high as 15 feet was pushed onto land. As the storm moved inland, the storm surge caused severe flooding across Southwest Florida, including Fort Myers, Cape Coral and Naples.
ABC News also shared the time-lapse video of the water surge from the Marriott Sanibel in Fort Meyers. The building matches the one seen in the viral video.
Since the video has been present on the internet since 2022, it is clear that the video does not show footage of recent Hurricane Helene.
Conclusion-
Fact Crescendo found the claim made along with the viral video to be False. This video is not recent, it is a footage of Hurricane Ian in September, 2022
Title:Old video of Hurricane Ian falsely shared as Florida amid Hurricane Helene
Fact Check By: Usha ManojResult: False
