Does a viral video show tsunami waves caused by a July 29, 2025 earthquake off Russia's eastern coast hitting California's coast? No, that's not true: The Los Angeles Times described the tsunami waves as "modest". California emergency management officials reported none of the kind of flooding and destruction shown in the viral video and had lifted warnings by midmorning on July 30. At least one of the clips in the video had been online for more than a year by the time the earthquake occurred.
The video compilation of disaster scenes appeared in a July 30, 2025 X.com post (archived here) on the @Worldwar_3_ account under the title "🌊 BREAKING"
It opened:
The National Weather Service in Los Angeles has confirmed
TSUNAMI WAVES HAVE OFFICIALLY REACHED THE CALIFORNIA COAST.
⚠️ First Wave Hits -- Stay Alert, Stay Safe!
This is what the post looked like on X at the time this fact check was written:
(Source: Screenshot by Lead Stories of x.com/Worldwar_3_ post.)
The opening scene of the video is a clip posted in November of 2023 described as waves during a storm on the Black Sea:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of the 2023 video posted to X by @SororInimicorum account.)
The video is a series of scenes of massive waves crashing tropical beaches, floodwaters filling city streets and cars being washed downhill, all of them labelled "California First Wave of Tsunami", as shown in a Lead Stories chart of the images below:
(Source: Screenshots of six scenes from video posted to X by @Worldwar_3_ account, arranged into chart by Lead Stories.)
Lead Stories searched California news sites and found no coverage of any such destruction wrought by the tsunami that came ashore there after the 8.8 magnitude earthquake of July 29, 2025 offshore near Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula.
The Los Angeles Times' front-page story (archived here) called the tsunami waves "modest", noting only the destruction of a dock at Crescent City, not widespread flooding, streets turned into rivers or anything resembling the scenes in the video compilation posted to X:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of the LATimes online version of July 30, 2025 front page story.)
Lead Stories searched the Google News index of thousands of news sites and found no reports (archived here) of damage or flooding of the magnitude shown in the viral video on X. Waves hitting California were measured at just 4 feet.
By mid-morning July 30, state and federal agencies had lifted warnings for the California coastline (archived here).
Lead Stories also searched the Yahoo! News index of news services and its partner news sites and found no reports (archived here) of flooding or widespread property destruction in California. Credible news sites reported the tsunami wave caused minimal damage and disruption in California.
Readers interested in other Lead Stories fact checks about this tsunami and others will find them collected here.
