Texans on Mission deploys to Texas Hill Country wildfires, Missouri tornado
Non-profit Texans on a Mission is on two big missions to lend a helping hand to people who have been affected by natural disasters.
A trailer full of supplies and love left Dallas Tuesday to help those who need it the most.
"We know these are the most difficult times in people's lives, and we just seek to lift them up," Texans on Mission spokesman John Hall said.
A Texans on Misson trailer made its way to Texas Hill Country to help firefighters battling almost 10,000 acres of wildfires in the Fredericksburg area.
"We're doing all of their laundry, and so it's one more thing that they just don't have to think about. They don't use energy or mental energy just to get that taken care of," Hall said.
The trailer has six washer and dryer units, and those the Texans on Mission said this is just the beginning of what they're planning on doing in that area. Hall said the non-profit will likely help homeowners once the fire is contained.
"At that point, we may need to send in fire recovery teams to begin looking for items that may have been lost or even clearing entire lot if homes have been entirely lost," Hall said.
Texans on Misson is also getting ready to help people affected by an EF3 tornado in Popular Bluff, Missouri.
"In Missouri, we have a feeding team. We have chainsaw teams. We have incident management teams that will oversee the relief in an entire county in southeast Missouri. The needs there are great," Hall said.
Texans on Misson, formerly Texas Baptist Mem, is also keeping an eye on North Texas.
"We're in a in a situation of high winds, low humidity, likely to encourage fires, and so where fires happen, we're ready to respond, and our teams are ready to go," Hall said.
The non-profit is busy serving people's spiritual, emotional, and spiritual needs as they make a difference on trailer at a time.
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WIRED
3 days ago
- WIRED
The Viral Storm Streamers Predicting Deadly Tornadoes—Sometimes Faster Than the Government
Jun 11, 2025 7:30 AM Storm streamers are using radars and AI robots to predict extreme weather for millions of YouTube subscribers, in some cases faster than the National Weather Service, which has been gutted by DOGE. A large tornado moves down a highway in Texas. Photograph: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. Hall doesn't have a meteorology degree, but employs meteorologists like 27-year-old Andy Hill, who frequently appears on his livestream. Hill was on vacation during the deadly tornadoes, but noted that Hall had correctly read the radar. 'He was just looking at, essentially patterns and radar data, which is what I've attempted to teach him over the years,' Hill said. 'On May 16, I think Ryan definitely saved some lives.' A new generation of storm forecasters are going live on YouTube for hours during severe weather events, offering real-time updates to millions of subscribers through a network of storm chasers, and even using AI. Their devoted fans help shape the forecast by sending on-the-ground photos of these storms, for example lemon-sized hail, for the streamers to show live on their screens. As the Trump administration slashes federal weather forecasting staff and climate change supercharges storms, their reports are not only entertaining, but crucial and potentially life-saving. This form of weather content is growing rapidly, but so far there are two main YouTube weather forecasters. Hall, who employs about 40 people across his media business and non-profit, and YouTube's second biggest weather streamer, Max Velocity, are game changers who frequently warn their millions of fans about tornadoes on the ground before the NWS issues official alerts. They do this by interpreting blobs of color on the radar and hosting feeds of storm chasers going live from their vehicles. Hall's AI bot interacts with him during storms and it even has its own channel where it goes live 24/7. At the same time that storm streamers, who are funded via ads on YouTube and merch sales, are booming, the primary source they rely on is in chaos. The Trump administration and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have gutted staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which includes the National Weather Service, meaning less accurate forecasts from all meteorologists. The NWS, which was already understaffed, has lost 600 employees since January; in June, the NOAA announced it would rehire 100 NWS workers. And as yet another above-normal hurricane season begins, the new generation of storm streamers is careful to avoid the subject of climate change when talking to their audiences in deep red states — to avoid alienating viewers who don't believe in it. AI Weather Bot Y'all Bot lives on a server in Hall's Weather House in Kentucky, a large home that is decked out with a studio, edit suites and tornado shelter. When Y'all Bot launched last year, its first job was to interact with Hall on the livestream, helping to fill dead air. Y'all Bot was buggy at first but learned the ropes quickly. Now, it has its own channel separate from Hall's with more than 800,000 subscribers where it goes live 365 days a year, regurgitating NWS warnings and interacting with viewers. Viewers post in the chat asking the bot to tell them the weather in their area, and it reads them the latest forecast. However, it hasn't learned how to read radar imagery yet, Hill said, and would likely never be able to do that independent of human supervision. 'It's going through all the text-based information that it has access to and relaying it in a continuous format,' Hill said. 'Humans have to sleep, we can't always be there.' 'It is 100% independent, running itself,' said Caleb Beacham, a 22-year-old storm chaser who worked for Hall before leaving in early June. 'It has learned how to forecast weather all on its own through AI and computer learning.' 'We're seeing exponential growth on that channel,' Beacham said. He's aware of the backlash to AI but said their audience loves the little bot. 'We're trying to embrace it and incorporate it into that life-saving information.' Competition Heating Up Meanwhile, 22-year-old Max Schuster, who goes by Max Velocity, live streams tornado and hurricane forecasts from his dorm room in Florida. His more than one million YouTube subscribers are familiar with his cat Cheese Curd, who often walks across his desk, seeking attention. 'I'll usually pick her up at some point during the stream, and show everybody,' he tells WIRED. His operation is bare bones compared to Hall. Behind him is a neon sign in the shape of a storm cloud with a lightning bolt. He uses one camera, five monitors, a couple lights and simple software that instantly broadcasts new NWS alerts onto his livestreams. He recently graduated with a meteorology degree and is moving out of his dorm this summer into a larger studio space. As traditional media shrinks, storm streamers are growing; Schuster recently hired his first full-time employee—Reilly Dibble, who used to work for Hall. Unlike a traditional broadcast, YouTube allows Schuster to go live before there's a tornado warning, so he can warn viewers if a storm is likely to produce a tornado. When Hurricane Milton hit Florida last year, causing a tornado outbreak, Schuster said he heard from a viewer that his livestream prompted their family members to seek shelter. 'Our weather coverage is actually saving lives,' he said. Schuster expects the storm streaming world to get more crowded. He notes that competition has recently heated up between them. 'It's bound to happen, but he wanted to make this more of a competition on YouTube,' he says. 'We're definitely not as close as I thought we were.' National Weather Service Cuts Traditional forecasters, storm streamers, and even Y'all Bot rely heavily on the National Weather Service; the agency is a primary source that runs radar sites, launches weather balloons and flies planes into hurricanes. Cuts across the National Weather Service are making storm streamers nervous. The NWS weather balloon launches collect valuable information on temperature, humidity, pressure and winds. 'Because there's been a lack of balloon launches, the data that's getting fed into these models just haven't been as good as they could have been,' Beacham said. Fewer planes flying into hurricanes will mean less accurate forecasts of where hurricanes will make landfall, Schuster said. Jana Houser, a storm chaser and meteorology professor at Ohio State University, says the understaffing at the National Weather Service office in Jackson, Kentucky during deadly tornadoes was 'a small glimpse of what's to come. ' 'The office did as good of a job as they could have possibly done, but they didn't have the resources that they could have possibly had in a different climate,' Houser says. 'Unless we get full staffing in, there are going to be tired forecasters. There are going to be overworked people. There are going to be missed tornadoes.' Houser said streamers like Hall are providing a public service. 'He is helping to inform the general public, which is a service, especially under the context of a poorly-funded and resource-starved National Weather Service.' But she adds that storm streamers can misread the radar and raise the alarm about a cloud formation that is not capable of producing a tornado. This is problematic if there's conflicting information between a streamer and the National Weather Service. 'It can create a sense of distrust or confusion,' she said. Hill said his team is 'immensely careful' but it's impossible to perfectly forecast tornadoes, and they do make mistakes. Calling tornadoes before the National Weather Service means they have a higher false alarm rate than the federal agency, Hill said. 'There's a lot of layers there to justify before [the NWS] sends out a warning. So their false alarm rate is going to be much lower than ours,' Hill said. Climate Change Conundrum Hurricanes are becoming more frequent as global heating cooks the planet, but you wouldn't know it by watching the storm streamers. They know the climate is changing, but many of their viewers live in red states, so they avoid the subject. President Donald Trump has consistently downplayed climate change; during the 2024 election he called it 'a big hoax.' Yale's 2024 Climate Opinion Map that measures perceptions about climate change across the U.S. found that a majority of people in hurricane-prone states like Florida, Texas and Louisiana, and states in tornado alley, believe global warming is happening. But a sizable percentage of people in those states, around 30 percent, don't believe it's caused by human activities. Schuster, whose fans are mostly based in the hurricane and tornado zones of Texas, Illinois and Florida, believes climate change is happening. 'If you deny it, I don't know what to tell you—there's a lot of scientific evidence,' he says 'My opinion is not based off politics or anything like that,' he continues. 'It's based off of what I've been seeing data-wise, within the scientific field of meteorology.' But he doesn't talk about it on his channel. 'If I bring up climate change or something else, it'll probably end up being politicized.' Hill, meanwhile, takes a more nuanced approach; he doesn't directly reference climate change, but he attempts to educate viewers about climatology, hoping they will become more open to believing in climate change. 'As a climatologist, that's the smartest way to handle it,' Hill says. 'Because if I were to be direct with it, we would just lose 40 percent of our audience immediately.' He knows he's walking a tricky line. 'I don't think many people would be super happy about that, especially activists,' he says. But he argues that his approach is more likely to make climate skeptics curious instead of defensive. 'Especially in those deep red states, there's plenty of people who are still on the fence,' he says. 'It's going to be a long term thing but it's going to be something I work on my whole life,' Hill says. In the immediate future, the storm streamers are facing a busy hurricane season this year, and their audiences will likely continue to grow. Beacham predicted that people will soon create AI bots that can read radar and livestream personalized weather forecasts. And he expects more people will launch storm forecasting channels. 'We're going to see a lot more people start to do what Ryan and Max are doing,' he says. 'They've proven that it's possible.'
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Yahoo
Frankston begins cleanup after EF0 tornado
FRANKSTON, Texas (KETK)- The National Weather Service confirms an EF0 tornado caused significant damage in the city of Frankston. 'I see trees on the house, I see a tree on the road, a garage, and a driveway,' Grimes Tree & Land Services foreman Pedro Mancia said. NWS: EF-0 tornado strikes Anderson County amid severe East Texas weather on Tuesday Everyone was thankful the damage from the storm wasn't worse. 'Certainly, trees can be cut and restored, and lives, it's a little harder on that case, so we're just grateful that the damage is property and not people,' Texans on Mission state assessment coordinator Gary Monroe said. No deaths were reported from the storm, however there was one reported injury 'One man was hurt because he was in his house, and the tornado kind of picked him up, and that's pretty scary,' Monroe said. Tree companies, Texans on Mission, and the Red Cross filled the roads as they assessed the damage. The owner of Chico's Lawn Service made the trip from Jacksonville to help. 'I love the little, small town of Frankston and its quiet and good people. And I just, like I said, I have most of my clients and customers here,' Chico's Lawn Service owner Francisco Figueroa said. Severe storm devastates East Texas, cleanup efforts underway The owner lived in Frankston for ten years, and said he quickly called his elderly clients to check on them. Making sure their yards were cleaned. 'I'm just doing my part, you know, being out here, helping, doing what I can do as far as with what I got and equipment,' Figueroa said. Figueroa adds that now is the time for everyone to come together for those affected. Texans on Mission ask anyone who needs help with cleanup or repairing their homes to reach out to the mayor of Frankston or the pastor of the First Baptist Church. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to |
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Yahoo
National Weather Service confirms EF-2 tornado hit City of Lone Star
LONE STAR, Texas (KETK)– The National Weather Service has confirmed that an EF2 tornado tore through the city of Lone Star near the Ellison Creek Reservoir on Friday. Bowie, Cass, Morris counties declare local disaster after severe weather The Mayor of Lonestar, Brianna McClain, has issued a mandatory curfew until Friday for damaged neighborhoods. City officials said 40-50 families are displaced because homes are toppled by trees and no power in the area. Bowie-Cass Electric Cooperative has crews continuing to work on restoring power to the hardest hit areas. The Morris County Emergency Management team and local tree companies are still picking up the pieces, after the intense tornado left destruction all along its path. 'The trees are all broken down there. You can see where the path it took. If people had been out, somebody should have died, but no one did,' Chief Ernest Hastings with the Lone Star Police Department said. EF-1 tornado hits Hawkins causing major damage The Lakeview Baptist Assembly Church campgrounds near Ellison Creek Reservoir has had devastating damage to the property. The manager said nearly 250 trees were snapped and 75% of the cars in their parking lot were totaled and thrown hundreds of yards away. 'We had 50 something cars in the parking lot, probably 75% of them were damaged. We had six of them that were picked up and thrown probably 300 feet away that are totally totaled out,' campgrounds manager, Collier Szydloski said. The campgrounds was hosting a women's retreat when the tornado passed by. 125 women took cover in the auditorium basement and after the storm rolled out, the women saw the building heavily damaged. There were no injuries reported at the church. 4 tornadoes reported in East Texas, person injured at Hawkins' water bottling plant People in Lone Star said great progress has been made with the help of volunteers like Texans on Mission. 'Everybody's working. Everybody's putting their head together working this. You couldn't ask for a better response,' Hastings said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
