TikTok video purporting to show Tropical Cyclone Garance features old clips from U.S.
Analysis confirms video has no connection to Tropical Cyclone Garance
CLAIM
Footage posted on TikTok purported to show extreme weather conditions in La Réunion during Tropical Cyclone Garance.
BACKGROUND
A “purple” weather alert – the highest alert level possible – was issued by authorities on La Réunion as the French Indian Ocean island braced for Tropical Cyclone Garance.
The purple alert includes a strict curfew on the island’s entire population, and mobilises law enforcement and emergency services to deal with the fallout.
The cyclone had been forecast to sweep across La Réunion on Friday morning, February 28, and the island’s prefect Patrice Latron was quoted at around 6 a.m. GMT (10 a.m. local time) as saying that the storm was hitting the coast.
The island of Mauritius was also on high alert in anticipation of the storm’s arrival and closed its airport on Wednesday, while La Réunion did the same on Thursday.
Forecasters had warned the storm could bring sea swells of between seven and nine meters, up to 800 millimetres of rain, and powerful winds.
As the storm hit, a large amount of content was being shared on social media purporting to show the storm. One of these was a video posted to TikTok, which featured a number of disaster clips depicting tornadoes, floods, and fires. It had over 40,000 views hours after it was posted.
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A number of different pieces of text were overlaid on the video, saying “Cyclone”, “Cyclone Garance Alerte”, “February 2025” and “disaster”.
The video was posted with the caption: “Cyclone Garance Alerte #cyclone #garance #noticiastiktok”. An artificial TikTok audio was also overlaid on the clip, called ‘Thunderstorm (environmental sound)”, which features people screaming, wind sounds, and dramatic music.
The uploader is an account that regularly posts disaster compilations purporting to show different parts of the world, which is an immediate red flag.
METHOD
There were a number of hints in the compilation video posted to TikTok suggesting it might not be genuine, including the fact that the outdoor landscapes in the clips did not look like they were filmed in the same country.
Some of the clips looked like they were filmed in continental Europe or the Middle East — based on the buildings and plant life visible — while others resembled parts of North America.
One indication that some of the videos were filmed in the United States was the types of cars seen in some of the frames. Large pickup trucks, manufactured by Ford and other American car brands, are not as commonly found in Europe, Africa, or Asia. However, some of these clips feature large pickup trucks and housing that most closely resembles the American style.
One shot shows a man wearing a ‘Fire Rescue’ t-shirt. The only official language of Réunion is French, while Réunion Creole is also widely spoken. This makes the sight of an English ‘Fire Rescue’ t-shirt on a genuine firefighter in the territory unlikely.
Through reverse image searches on Google Lens, we were able to find earlier examples of the clip showing the man in the ‘Fire Rescue’ t-shirt, mainly on accounts that frequently share similar disaster compilation videos that are not their own.
For example, this video posted on February 13 shows the same scene. An Instagram logo for another account in that video led to us to this one, which was posted on February 12 purporting to show a tornado hitting Tennessee.
In one frame, shot in a carpark, a sign for the U.S. drugstore Walgreens is visible. A clearer example of this type of Walgreens sign can be viewed on Shutterstock.
While Walgreens is only named as such in the United States, its parent company, Walgreens Boots Alliance, operates stores internationally under other brand names.
There are 3,364 retail stores outside the U.S., named Boots in the UK, Ireland, and Thailand, and as Farmacias Benavides in Mexico. There are also franchise partners operating as Boots in other locations, including the Gulf states in the Middle East and in Indonesia, the Walgreens Boots Alliance states on its website.
This confirms there is no Walgreens store in Réunion or any of the other territories affected by Cyclone Garance early on Friday, February 28.
Another clip in the compilation shows a powerful tornado tearing across a field, ripping fences from a yard and sending piles of debris flying into the sky.
After running a still from this clip through a reverse image search, we found multiple older examples of its use. KAKE News, a TV news station based in Wichita, Kansas, shared a longer version of the same clip in reference to a powerful tornado in the town of Andover, Kansas, which happened in late April 2022.
It was also shared on YouTube soon after the Andover tornado happened, with the title: “Man continues filming Andover tornado right up until it swallows his yard”.
This evidence is enough to satisfy us that several of these clips are old and were likely filmed in the U.S. However, there was a wide variety of weather events shown in the compilation video, and some of the other clips resembled other territories.
A brief clip showing fire and smoke billowing near square houses on a rural hillside was filmed on a sunny day with blue skies. Reverse image searches on both Google Lens and TinEye did not yield any exact matches.
A visual analysis suggests the clip may have been filmed in the Middle East, where such square, white houses are frequently seen, particularly in the Levantine region that includes Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Syria. In any case, the flames and smoke, coupled with the blue sky, does not suggest it was filmed during a cyclone event.
Not all of the clips were possible to trace using reverse image searches. The uploader’s placing of multiple pieces of text on top of the video makes running reverse searches more difficult, as you need a wide enough view — without text — to get an image sufficiently clear to generate matches.
However, based on the analysis we were able to carry out on a number of the clips included in the compilation, it was clear the video bore no relation to Tropical Cyclone Garance which hit the Indian Ocean island of Réunion on Friday morning.
As a final check, we used a tool to check the extract the upload timestamp of the video on TikTok, which is not visible in the app’s standard metadata. A date alone, or ‘XX hours ago’ is all that is usually visible on TikTok.
There are a number of tools to do this. We used this one, which confirmed the upload time as February 27 at 21:36 GMT (February 28 at 01:36 a.m. local time in Réunion).
This confirmed that the clips, some of which were filmed in daylight hours, were not filmed during Tropical Cyclone Garance, which would not make landfall until later the same morning.
RATING
A visual analysis of several of the clips included in the compilation, as well as a closer inspection of the upload time of the TikTok video, confirmed the video has no connection to Tropical Cyclone Garance.
SOURCES
Shackelford, R. and Szekeres, E. (2025). Tropical cyclone smashes into French Indian Ocean island, bringing 100-mile-an-hour winds. [online] CNN. [Accessed 28 Feb. 2025].
France 24 (2025). La Reunion island hit by power cuts in wake of Cyclone Garance. [online] France 24. [Accessed 28 Feb. 2025].
Tiktok.com. (2025). TikTok – Make Your Day. [online] Available at: Cyclone Garance Alerte [Accessed 28 Feb. 2025].
Instagram. (2025). nurhayat_syg81 on Instagram: ‘#fyp #keşfetteyiz #keşfet #tiktok’. [online] [Accessed 28 Feb. 2025].
Instagram. (2021). الان on Instagram: ‘🌪️😢’. [online] [Accessed 28 Feb. 2025].
Walgreens Boots Alliance. (2024). International Segment. [online] [Accessed 28 Feb. 2025].
Shutterstock. (2021). Gladstone Usa Jun 18 2021 Closeup Stock Photo 2001341675 | Shutterstock. [online] [Accessed 28 Feb. 2025].
KAKE News. (2020). Facebook. [online] Two years ago today, an EF-3 tornado devastated the town of Andover [Accessed 28 Feb. 2025].
Youtube.com. (2025). Man continues filming Andover tornado right up until it swallows his yard [Accessed 28 Feb. 2025].
Github.io. (2025). Tiktok date extractor. [online] Available at: https://bellingcat.github.io/tiktok-timestamp/ [Accessed 28 Feb. 2025].