AT 10:44 PM eastern time on May 16, Ryan Hall spotted a blue square on his radar indicating debris flying into the air and realized a huge tornado was racing toward Somerset, Kentucky.
“We’ve been watching this storm for a while, we’ve been hootin’ and hollerin’ for a while, hopefully the message has gotten out there and we know to be in our safe spots,” Hall warned his YouTube audience in a calm voice with a Southern twang.
A silver robot with blue eyes popped onto the screen to tell Hall that a viewer had commented about tiny houses near the tornado. “Oh really?” Hall replied to his AI robot, known as Y’all Bot.
The 31-year-old host of Ryan Hall, Y’all—one of YouTube’s most popular weather channels with 2.8 million subscribers—went live for nearly 12 hours that day as more than 70 tornadoes swept through the central U.S., killing at least 28 people. Nineteen of the dead were in Kentucky. Hall, too, was under tornado warning as he streamed from his home in Kentucky.
Sirens went off in Somerset, but the National Weather Service lagged behind in upgrading its tornado warning, Hall told viewers. He also said that recent cuts had left the NWS office in Jackson, Kentucky short staffed. “We’re about to have a large tornado go through a very populated area with much less warning than what there should be, as a result of that,” he said. It wasn’t until 10:57 pm that the NWS finally upgraded its tornado warning for Somerset.
