No, viral cloud video isn’t from the East Palestine train derailment

On Friday, Feb. 3, about 50 cars from a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. Some of those cars were carrying hazardous material, including vinyl chloride. The toxic chemical was released from some of the train cars and burned, resulting in a large plume of smoke over the area. 

One video with more than 700,000 views was posted to Twitter on Feb. 13 and claims to show the scene from Ohio. The tweet posted on Feb. 13 says: “This is Ohio's Chernobyl.”

THE QUESTION

Does the viral video posted on Feb. 13 show the sky in Ohio?

THE SOURCES

• InVid and RevEye, footage forensics tools
• Video from November 2022
• @princess_cisneros TikTok
• Google Maps

THE ANSWER

No, this viral cloud video isn’t from the Ohio train derailment. It was posted months before the train derailment, and was taken in Oregon. 

WHAT WE FOUND

Using InVid, a video forensics tool, VERIFY analyzed the keyframes of the viral video and conducted a reverse image search of the frames.

VERIFY was able to trace the video to the TikTok account @princess_cisneros, who posted the video on November 13, 2022 – nearly three months before the train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. 

In a follow-up video, the TikToker confirmed the video is months old and she said she took the video from Jantzen Beach, north of Portland. 

In the video, she said she took a video of the clouds as they rolled into the area, and said she didn’t make any edits to the video.

“It is not fake. It’s not an app that I edited. I didn’t do anything to it, it’s an old video. I had it up before and I ended up deleting all the videos from my TikTok and restarted, uploading other videos which were kind of the same,” she said in the video.

VERIFY also confirmed the location of the viral video using Google Maps. The video was taken from Jantzen Beach. The same building seen in the video can be seen in satellite imagery. 

More from VERIFY: What we can VERIFY about the Ohio train derailment