Does this photo show a shark swimming on a flooded highway?

The claim: Whenever there's a big storm somewhere, a photo of a shark fin swimming next to a car on a flooded highway goes viral, usually with a caption saying it was taken "today".

A friend sent it to me last winter asking if it was real, so I looked into it.

What we found

1. The image is a well-known fake. Snopes first debunked it in 2011, when it was shared as a photo from Hurricane Irene.
2. The shark comes from a different photo, of a great white following a kayak, published years earlier, which was edited into a flooded street.
3. The same picture has reappeared during Hurricanes Sandy, Harvey and Irma, and in 2023 it was shared again during Tropical Storm Hilary in California.

Verdict

False. The photo is an edited image that has circulated for more than a decade.

How to check pictures like this yourself: run a reverse image search with Google Lens, TinEye or Bing. If the same picture shows up years before the event it supposedly shows, you have your answer.