Must See Videos | Hurricane Florence Devastates The NC Coast

By Friday evening, Florence was downgraded to a tropical storm, its winds weakened to 70 mph as it moved forward at 3 mph about 15 miles north of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Mr Cooper said: “Catastrophic effects will be felt outside the center of the storm due to storm surge.

“We’ll handle it. We’re ready”.

The Category 1 hurricane’s center is expected to crash onshore sometime Friday and unload flash flooding, pounding wind and towering storm surges at least through Saturday.

The National Hurricane Centre (NHC) downgraded it to a tropical storm on Friday, but warned it would dump as much as 76 to 102cm of rain on the south-eastern coast of North Carolina and part of north-eastern SC.

“We got a little bit of water inside, but things weren’t so bad”, Church said.

Artist Sarah Loeffler Misch shared several videos of the rising waters in Avon, North Carolina – part of the Outer Banks. Florence dumped more than 20 inches on Oriental, N.C., the NHC said. The last Category 4 storm to come out of the Atlantic and strike the North Carolina coast head-on was Hazel in 1954, the most destructive previous event in that region.

One city in North Carolina has picked up more than 23 inches (58 centimetres) of rain in two days. “It’s not the middle of a hurricane yet, so why not come for a beer?” said Waters, 54.

Officials said some 1.7 million people in the Carolinas and Virginia were warned to evacuate, but it’s unclear how many did.

The No. 1 mission right now, Cooper said, is to save lives.

People survey the damage on Front Street in downtown New Bern, North Carolina.

“We’ve got nearly 20,000 people in 157 shelters”, Cooper said.

Hurricane Florence has made landfall in North Carolina, but its crawling pace and overwhelming storm surges are setting up hours and hours of destruction and human suffering – with dozens desperately awaiting rescue in one flooded town alone.

Florence made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane at 7:15 a.m.at Wrightsville Beach, a few miles east of Wilmington, not far from the SC line, coming ashore along a mostly boarded-up, emptied-out stretch of coastline.

Florence is moving toward land at 9 kilometers per hour (6 mph), giving it more time to churn, suck up water, batter the coast, and bring massive amounts of rain inland.

Organizer Clyde Cain, told CNN the Cajun Navy was staged in New Bern and had received more than 500 calls for assistance. “I’m not sure what’s that floating down there, but it’s big”.

There’s still a threat from rising tides, Risty-Davis says. More are on the way to help us.

Eudy and his family stayed home in New Bern partly to protect their house. The agency adds that people trapped by flooding should “never enter attics or crawl spaces”.

A weather station at a community college recorded a 100 miles per hour wind gust, and forecasters tweeted that a 91 miles per hour wind gust slammed into Wilmington’s airport, surpassing the power of Hurricane Fran two decades ago.

This enhanced satellite image made available by NOAA shows Hurricane Florence off the eastern coast of the United States on Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2018 at 5:52 p.m. EDT.

Florence’s center will approach the North and SC coasts late Thursday and Friday. “You’re going to have flooding miles and miles inland”, the center’s director, Ken Graham, said Friday morning.

The National Hurricane Center said there was more than 10 feet of inundation in New Bern.

Forecasters warned that drenching rains of anywhere from 1 to 3½ feet as the storm crawls westward across North and SC could trigger epic flooding well inland over the next few days. Some areas of SC could see rainfall totals of up to 15 inches, forecasters said.

Additional states have declared states of emergency ahead of the storm, including Georgia and the District of Columbia. Thousands of soldiers from their National Guard forces have been mobilized.

Hurricane Florence, as seen from the International Space Station.