Videos don’t show Seattle tornadoes; no twisters touched down there March 26 or 27

Several TikTok videos showing dramatic footage of destructive tornadoes said the images showed twisters touching down in Seattle on March 26 and 27.

"Tornado hits Seattle, Washington today," said a March 26 video, featuring three clips of twisters wreaking havoc. That video amassed nearly 240,000 views by March 28.

Another video dated March 27 said a "Massive tornado hits Seattl (sic), Washington," and shared several scenes.

A third video also dated March 27 shared tornado footage that it said was from Seattle. All three videos had the same soundtrack: dramatic music and people screaming, original sound credited to "Disaster Today."

TikTok identified these videos as part of its efforts to counter inauthentic, misleading or false content. (Read more about PolitiFact's partnership with TikTok.)

(Screenshot from TikTok)

There was bad weather in Seattle those days. But there were no reports of tornadoes touching down in the city March 26 or 27, Logan Howard, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Seattle, told PolitiFact.

"We had some thunderstorms move through. On (March 26), we were forecasting for some of them to potentially be severe, but that kind of didn’t manifest," Howard said. 

There were no reports of severe wind or hail out of those thunderstorms, just frequent lighting and heavy rain, Howard said. On March 27, there was rain, but no thunderstorms.

Mike Doll, an AccuWeather meteorologist, said tornadoes are very rare in Seattle or in Washington state.

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"As far as we have seen, there were no tornadoes on the 26th and 27th," Doll said, adding there were no reports of wind damage despite rain and thunderstorms in that region.

Local news outlets reporting on the storm did not mention tornadoes touching down in the city, either. The Seattle Times reported that residents were preparing for the possibility of two-inch hailstones and the "minimal threat" of a tornado, but "no twisters were reported."

The Seattle Office of Emergency Management issued no alerts about tornadoes, but warned of severe thunderstorms on March 26.

The video clips the TikTok videos used are from older tornadoes that touched down elsewhere.

The March 26 video showed three scenes. Using a reverse image search, we found the first, footage shot from someone’s back porch, that a TikTok user posted in June 2024, saying it was from Goreville, Illinois. A YouTube account shared the same video on May 26, 2024, also citing Goreville. 

One March 27 video showed a tornado filmed from a moving vehicle touching down on a road. A reverse image search showed that video was from a tornado in Andover, Kansas, in 2022.

Another video shared footage taken in a residential neighborhood showing a tree being uprooted and blown away by a twister. Using a reverse image search, we traced that footage to a 2019 tornado in Morgantown, Pennsylvania.

Dan DePodwin, AccuWeather's senior director of forecasting operations, looked at the videos PolitiFact sent.

"The flat topography, fall foliage on the trees, and even palm trees in some of these clips make it clear that these are intentionally misleading videos that were not recorded in Seattle or anywhere near the Pacific Northwest," DePodwin said.

He said the videos are examples of a "disturbing trend" of social media users taking footage from real extreme weather events — and sometimes artificially generated videos — to create "intentionally misleading posts."

A March 14 Facebook video shared images of what it said were tornadoes in Dallas, using the same music as the TikTok videos. The person who posted that says in his profile that he’s a digital creator and shares what appear to be AI-generated disaster videos.

We rate the claim that videos show tornadoes touching down in Seattle on March 26 and 27 as Pants on Fire!