A powerful jolt that struck Taiwan on April 3 caused landslides in the island’s mountainous east. However, dramatic footage of vehicles crushed by rocks on a highway circulating on social media was in fact unrelated to the disaster. The video was filmed in Peru and surfaced online weeks before the quake, Taiwan’s strongest in 25 years.<\/h3>\n
The dash-cam footage shows a huge boulder crash down from a slope and slam into a moving truck on a highway. More rocks hurtle down and appear to land on the vehicle filming.<\/p>\n
“There are still people trapped in the mountains who haven’t been rescued yet,” reads a traditional Chinese post on social media platform X<\/a> that shared the video on April 4, 2024.<\/p>\n “This earthquake is massive and I have friends who are homeless.”<\/p>\n Latitude and longitude codes are seen at the bottom-left corner of the clip.<\/p>\n The X post was shared the day after a magnitude-7.4 earthquake<\/a> hit Taiwan, killing at least 16 people and injuring more than 1,100.<\/p>\n Strict building codes and widespread disaster readiness were credited with averting an even bigger catastrophe.<\/p>\n But landslides<\/a> around the epicentre Hualien still blocked tunnels and roads, making the mountainous terrain around the county difficult for rescuers to access survivors and victims.<\/p>\n The video was also shared in a\u00a0Facebook post<\/a> falsely linking it to the tremor, while a Taiwanese newspaper article<\/a> falsely shared a screenshot of it.<\/p>\n A Google reverse image search of the video and keyword searches found the footage in an article about a landslide in Peru in March — one month before the Taiwan earthquake.<\/p>\n Peruvian newspaper La Rep\u00fablica reported<\/a> that nobody was killed by the landslide, which caused significant damage to the highway (archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n “The incident seriously impacted<\/span> two trucks travelling through the area, although fortunately, the gigantic rocks did not cause any human deaths,” it says in Spanish.<\/p>\n “They only damaged the rear part of the vehicles, which prevented a greater tragedy.”<\/p>\n The incident happened on March 2 on the Carretera Central<\/span> highway in the San Mateo district of Huarochir\u00ed province, La Rep\u00fablica reported — which is around 100 kilometres (60 miles) northeast of the capital Lima<\/span>.<\/p>\n Below is a screenshot comparison of the video shared in false posts (left) and in La Rep\u00fablica’s article (right):<\/p>\nPeru landslide<\/h3>\n