What was claimed
A video shows footage of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hitting Khao Lak in Thailand.
Our verdict
False. The video shows footage from a tsunami that hit Japan in 2011.
Video shows footage from 2011 Japan tsunami
15 December 2023
A post with hundreds of thousands of views on social media, including on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, incorrectly claims that a video is of a wave hitting Thailand in 2004, after the Indian Ocean tsunami. The video is actually from 2011 and shows a tsunami striking north-east Japan.
The video is nearly a minute long, and at first shows a road with a number of cars turning around and driving out of frame. A wave gradually comes into shot, carrying with it a host of debris including cars and houses.
The post on X says: “This security footage shows the moment the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hit Khao Lak in Thailand. The disaster went on to claim the lives of an estimated 227,898 people in 14 countries.”
Screengrabs from the video are included in an article from Japanese news site Sora News 24 about the tsunami that occurred on 11 March 2011. The website says the footage was recorded in Yamada, a town in north-east Japan.
The video also appears in a compilation uploaded to YouTube in April 2013. The video links to a website with the URL infra-archive311.jp. This website is the ‘Earthquake Memorial Museum’, focusing on the earthquake and tsunami from 2011, and appears to be owned by Tohoku Regional Development Bureau, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. Tohoku is a north-east region of Japan, within which Yamada lies.
The website’s video page contains a file featuring the footage. The website labels this as “footage of tsunami captured by the fixed-point cameras on the national highway”, and details it as follows: “a collection of footage filmed by the cameras installed over the national highway at three locations along the Iwate coastal area”. The town of Yamada is within the Iwate Prefecture (a Japanese regional authority).
The YouTube video caption also links to a specific location on Google Maps. Fact checkers at AFP used satellite imagery to verify the location of the video as this same place in Yamada, Japan.
This video has been shared and debunked before, with people incorrectly claiming it showed a tsunami in Indonesia.
Further, the text imposed on the video is in Japanese, not in Thai.
Full Fact often sees videos and images showing natural disasters being miscaptioned. We’ve written about misinformation relating to the earthquake in Turkey and Syria in February 2023, the Maui wildfires in August and the flooding in Libya in September.
It’s always worth checking if social media images and videos show what the post says they do before you share them—we’ve written guides on how to do so here and here.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because this footage is actually from a tsunami that struck Japan in 2011.