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There were continuous lorry queues at Dover on 22 January 2022, that were longer than the Channel itself, and could be seen from space. We don’t know how long exactly the queues were on that date. They likely could be seen from satellite images, as most road queues can be. We haven’t seen evidence the queues were longer than the English Channel. The BBC did not report on these queues. The BBC News website did publish a local report on the queues that day. We don’t know if the stories appeared on BBC televised news. Several posts on Facebook make the following claim: So, there are continuous 🚛 queues at Dover that can be seen from space. 🌚 Longer than the channel itself. They can't, however, be seen on the BBC. 📺 Both were posted on 22 January 2022. Stay informed Be first in line for the facts – get our free weekly email Subscribe Satellite imagery is so sophisticated now, that you can see details like individual cars on roads, so it makes sense that you can also see queues of vehicles too, however long the queue. The images on Google Maps are taken by cameras on satellites and aircraft and whether you count those as being in ‘space’ is more of an opinion. Importantly, Google itself stipulates: Images aren't in real time, so you won't see live changes. The Mirror reported on 21 January: Huge Dover lorry queue so long you can see it on Google Maps amid Brexit check delays. It’s true that queues of lorries heading towards the port of Dover on the A20 can be seen on Google Maps via satellite. However, it’s not clear exactly when these satellite images were taken. Not really. If you look on Google Maps, it just says Imagery © 2022 and then lists a number of satellite and aerial photography providers such as the French National Centre for Space Studies and Airbus. If you look at the same area on Google Earth and zoom out slightly it says Imagery date: 3/31/21–newer and also lists several providers of satellite imagery such as the US Navy and the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This probably means the whole image is a composite of several different pictures from different satellites. Regardless of when it was taken, we used Google’s distance measuring tool to see how far the tailback in that particular image was. Between the first roundabout coming off the A20 and what appeared to be the end of the main tailback, it was about 2.1 miles. As above, we don’t know exactly how long the queues were on the 22 January 2022. Several newspapers quoted different figures on that day: The English Channel varies in width, but Dover Straight, the narrowest part, is just 21 miles (almost 34 km) wide. We have seen no evidence that the Dover queues around 22 January 2022 were as long as that. We were able to find at least one local news story covering the lorry queues at Dover on the BBC’s website on 22 January. The official BBC South East Twitter account posted the story on the same day and it has since been posted again on 24 January by the BBC Politics account alongside a clip of a panel discussion about Brexit. However, the inclusion of the television emoji may mean the person posting on Facebook meant the story was not broadcast on BBC television news. We can’t check this as BBC iPlayer doesn’t allow you to watch back news programmes several days after they broadcast for various reasons, but it seems unlikely that the story would have had national televised news coverage if there was only a local story on the website that day about it. Image courtesy of Wolfgang Hasselmann via Unsplash. This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as missing context because although lorry queues can be seen from satellite images, there isn’t evidence that queues at Dover that day were longer than the Channel, and although there was a local news report on it, we don’t know if it appeared on TV bulletins.
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