Claim: A video shows an apartment building in Turkey collapsing after the massive earthquake that hit the country on 6 February 2023.
Fact: The clip is, in fact, from 2021 and shows the collapse of a 12-story apartment block called Champlain Towers South in Miami-Dade in the US state of Florida.
In the morning of 6 February 2023, two powerful earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria, killing over 1,300 people — though fatalities are expected to rise — and levelling hundreds of buildings.
Some reports state that the quake of 7.8-magnitude is the worst to hit Turkey — officially the Republic of Türkiye — since 1999.
In the context of this devastating Turkey earthquake, a Twitter user @RaoAqib_PTI posted a video on 6 February, showing a building collapsing in the background with a sports ground in the foreground. The tweet was captioned as follows:
“Powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake hits in southern Turkey. There are reports of several hundred dead. #earthquake #DEPREMOLDU #Turkey #deprem #diyarbakır #amed #DEPREMOLDU”
The hashtag, “#DEPREMOLDU,” is currently being used by survivors asking for help from social media users after becoming trapped under the rubble from the massive earthquake.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check ascertained through reverse image search tools that the video is old and was not shot in Turkey.
The reverse image search tools turned up numerous media reports, including articles by The Guardian and BBC Mundo, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s website for Latin American news.
According to The Guardian, the video shows “the moment an apartment block in Miami-Dade in Florida suddenly caved in” on the night of 24 June 2021. The 12-story building in Surfside was called “Champlain Towers South”, per BBC Mundo.
The Washington Post reported that the “12-story high-rise pancaked in on itself with no apparent warning in the middle of the night”. More information can be found on the Wikipedia page about the Surfside condominium collapse.
JUST IN: Video I’ve obtained of the building collapse in Surfside, Florida. pic.twitter.com/BGbRC7iSI9
— Andy Slater (@AndySlater) June 24, 2021
American talk show host Andy Slater also posted the video on 24 June 2021.
Virality
Soch Fact Check found the same video posted by another Twitter user — @ismailrojbayani — that gained significant traction, with over 930,000 people viewing the post, more than 578,000 viewing the video, as well as 441 comments, 2,059 retweets, and 2,995 likes, as of writing time.
The tweet about Turkey earthquake by @RaoAqib_PTI was viewed over 53,800 times and received 18 comments, 65 retweets, and 78 likes. The video it contains was watched more than 26,800 times.
We also found the video shared here, here, here, and here on Facebook, with this and this post by verified Facebook pages, which received over 23,000 and 55,000 views, respectively.
Conclusion: The video shows the 24 June 2021 collapse of Champlain Towers South, a 12-story apartment block in Miami-Dade in the US state of Florida.
Background image in cover photo: Meg Jerrard