Red Cross apologizes after tweeting incorrect Typhoon Haiyan photo

TORONTO – The American Red Cross has apologized after tweeting a incorrect image of Typhoon Haiyan, incorrectly depicting the size of the devastating storm.

On Monday the organization tweeted a photo comparing the size of Typhoon Haiyan to a map of the United States, saying incorrectly that the storm would have covered most of the continental U.S.

“A storm the size of Typhoon Haiyan would cover nearly the entire continental U.S. ,” read the tweet, which has since been deleted.

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The tweet garnered almost 800 retweets before the organization deleted the tweet. Hours later Red Cross issued an apology on its blog, stating that the map was not to scale.

“In the process of making the rest of our maps for our operations in the Philippines, we made a mistake with this one and it was not to scale. We always strive to provide the most accurate information possible and we missed the mark with this one – literally,” read the apology.

“We would like to apologize for this mistake and thank the people who kindly pointed this out to us.”

READ MORE: 9 powerful photos from Typhoon Haiyan

The blog noted that the Red Cross was working on revising the image, but as of Tuesday morning no new images had been tweeted.

The New Republic’s Nate Cohn debunked the false photo, noting that despite Haiyan’s large size it was nowhere near the size of the U.S.

“The central dense overcast—the strong convection ringing the eye that’s colored black in the hoax—is only about the size of the southern most island of the Philippines, not the entire southeast of the United States,” wrote Cohn.

Cohn used satellite images and images of the Philippines imposed on the U.S. to show the Red Cross’ error.

The official death toll from the disaster rose to 1,774 on Tuesday, but authorities expect that to rise. More than 9 million people have been affected across a large swath of the country, many of them made homeless.