Video shows Hurricane Ian, not Helene

As Hurricane Helene pounded the southeastern United States with devastating winds and flooding in late September 2024, social media users claimed a video showed the powerful storm's effects in the state of Florida. But the clip was taken in 2022 during Hurricane Ian, one of the most destructive in US history.

"I'll never understand you idiots that live in Florida in the center of hurricane pathways…. This is from hurricane Helene right now, storm surge is like 15-20ft," says a September 25, 2024 X post with hundreds of interactions.

Helene made landfall September 26 on the Florida Panhandle as a dangerous Category 4 hurricane, leaving a trail of death and destruction. The National Weather Service warned of "catastrophic and potentially life-threatening" flooding as the storm headed inland and weakened.

AFP and other news organizations captured dramatic images of the destruction.

But the video shared on X is unrelated to Hurricane Helene.

A watermark on the clip says "Max Olson Chasing." Olson, a self-described "storm chaser," originally posted the segment September 29, 2022 on X (archived here).

"Absolutely heartbreaking footage captured by our surge probe of catastrophic storm surge washing away homes. I have never seen anything like this," Olson said in the caption, linking to a longer YouTube video (archived here).

Some X users shared the same clip in context while attempting to highlight the hazards of storm surges. The X user sharing the video out of context followed up a day later, saying: "Oh my bad it's from 2022 -- okay lol my point still stands hahah."

A reverse image search using keyframes from the video found the same footage in multiple 2022 news reports about Hurricane Ian, which killed dozens of people and was the third costliest US weather disaster.

AFP has fat-checked other misinformation about natural disasters here, here and here.