An earthquake of 7.1 magnitude hit New Zealand’s Kermadec Islands region on March 16, 2023, prompting tsunami warnings. Against this backdrop, a video showing waves in a swimming pool with people all around it is widely shared on social media, claiming to be of the recent earthquake in New Zealand.
The Facebook post reads: Imagine what #earthquake can do. A strong #Earthquake of 7.1 Magnitude hits #NewZealand today. #Tsunami alerted in Kermadac Island. #turkeyearthquake2023 has taken 50,000 lives with the same intensity. Pray for safety of #newzeland. #newzealand #newzelandearthquake.
Here’s the link to the above post.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile fact-checked the viral video, and found it to be misleading.
Running a Reverse Image Search of the video keyframes, we found a news article, titled: Nepal earthquake video: Watch ‘mini tsunami’ form in Kathmandu hotel swimming pool during April’s massive tremors, published on the website of The Independent — a British online newspaper, dated May 12, 2015.
The image in the news article matches one of the keyframes of the viral video. As per the article, the viral video is from the Nepal earthquake that hit Kathmandu in 2015. The ‘mini-tsunami’ in the swimming pool was due to an earthquake of 7.8 magnitude.
The keyframes of another video on Dailymotion — a video-sharing platform, in 2015, with a title: What Happened to Swimming Pool in Nepal Earthquake, match exactly with the viral video.
Many YouTube videos have also carried the same incident. The video, titled: Earthquake April 2015 Nepal, published on April 25, 2015, on the YouTube channel Adriaan Los matches the viral video. The description of the video states that the incident happened in the Summit Hotel, Kathmandu, in 2015, confirming that it is from Nepal, not a recent one from New Zealand.
Therefore, we can conclusively say that the viral video showing a mini-tsunami being formed in a swimming pool during the recent earthquake in New Zealand is misleading.
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