Does Photo Show Airplane View of Smoke Clouds from Ohio Train Derailment?

On Feb. 14, 2023, a Reddit user posted a picture with the caption, “Passenger photo while plane flew near East Palestine, Ohio … chemical fire after train derailed.” The context of the photo, purportedly, was that it had been taken from an airplane flying at cruising altitude, where black smoke from the Ohio train derailment was visible in the layer of clouds down below.

The post had accumulated more than 130,000 points and rocketed to the front page of the website, making it one of the most popular posts of the day.

We approached the picture with some caution, as social media users have been known to make fake or unrelated photos go viral following disasters. For example, we recently reported about how several years-old pictures were shared with the misleading claim that they were taken after the earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria in February 2023.

In this story, we’ve documented our journey to trying to discover the origins of this and two other similar, seemingly ominous photos.

Photos from Controlled Burn

First, there’s no question that the train derailment that occurred on Feb. 3, 2023, led to massive amounts of smoke filling the air around East Palestine, Ohio, not to mention various concerns over the environmental impact of the disaster. Such concerns were discussed in another Reddit post that showed a different aerial picture, one that we were able to authenticate as real.

In the days following the disaster, journalists and professional photographers shared multiple pictures taken from the ground that showed a massive smoke cloud coming from the site of the derailment. This smoke was the result of a controlled burn that was occurring. The controlled release of toxic fumes was seen to be safer than the possibility a large explosion, according to officials.

On Feb. 6, The Associated Press reported that Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine had ordered temporary evacuations to allow the controlled release of toxic fumes to occur.

Officials warned the controlled burn would send phosgene and hydrogen chloride into the air. Phosgene is a highly toxic gas that can cause vomiting and breathing trouble and was used as a weapon in World War I.

Scott Deutsch of Norfolk Southern Railway earlier said doing this during the daytime would allow the fumes to disperse more quickly and prevent the rail cars from exploding and sending shrapnel and other debris from flying through the neighborhood.

“We can’t control where that goes,” he said.

The process involves using a small charge to blow a hole in the cars, allowing the material to go into a trench and burning it off before it’s released in the air, he said. The crews handling the controlled release have done this safely before, Deutsch said.

Officials lifted the evacuation order two days later on Feb. 8.

A Deleted Tweet

As for the Reddit post with the photo purportedly taken from an airplane, we found some reason to dig deeper to find out if it authentically showed what it said it showed.

The user who made the Reddit post later said in a comment, “I didn’t take this photo – I found it on Twitter.” They then linked to the tweet from Feb. 14. However, that tweet has since been been deleted.

According to an archive of the tweet from Google cache, the Twitter user who posted it originally shared the following caption: “This is a picture from a airplane flying above the East Palestine area on the day the chemicals were released from the train car.”

The Original Post

We eventually found a tweet from Feb. 13 that showed the same photo along with another one. The user claimed, “This is more than #Ohio. I’m across the lake (Lake Erie) in southern Ontario Canada by Niagara Falls and me and my family have had non stop head aches for about 7 days straight now. We can literally smell the chlorine over here in Canada. This is bigger than they are telling us.”

According to replies, this user had not yet responded to requests for information regarding where they claimed to have obtained the pictures.

Another Twitter user also reposted one of the photos, but later tweeted, “Note that the source is ‘from Reddit’ and his source was ‘from Twitter,’ so it’s quite possible that this pic is a bunch of crap.”

One of the replies under this tweet came from the popular Zoom Earth account. The Twitter bio for @zoom_earth says that its website, zoom.earth, allows users to “track storms in real-time.”

The account noted of the skies above East Palestine on Feb. 6, “A black area can be seen here but not very clearly due to the day-night imagery overlap.” This was a helpful piece of information, but wasn’t quite enough data for us to be able to say whether or not the photos and their captions were authentic.

Additionally, a third photo was going around that also supposedly showed the same clouds.

Inconclusive Findings

In the end, we found multiple tweets with users who were skeptical that these pictures truly did show the smoke from the Ohio train derailment.

While it’s entirely possible that these photos do show the clouds above the disaster site, we note that we were not yet able to find any information regarding who took the pictures. For example, had these been posted originally on Facebook by a passenger on an airplane, that post would likely be viral by now, with multiple mentions by credible news organizations.

The absence of evidence does not necessarily make something false. Rather, it simply means that it hasn’t yet been proven. For now, we have chosen our “Unproven” rating, which is defined as follows: “This rating applies to a claim for which we have examined the available evidence but could not arrive at a true or false determination, meaning the evidence is inconclusive or self-contradictory.”

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