Storm surges, punishing winds and rain are turning some towns into rushing rivers — and the Category 1 hurricane is expected to crawl over parts of the Carolinas into the weekend, pounding some of the same areas over and over. 2 power company, said Florence could knock out electricity to three-quarters of its 4 million customers in the Carolinas, and outages could last for weeks. 
• The outer bands of Hurricane Florence have started to hit the coast of the Carolinas as it was downgraded to a Category 1 storm late Thursday night, with sustained winds topping 90 mph. She said the momentum the storm has generated on its long trip across the Atlantic won’t go away just “because the winds decrease a couple miles an hour.”

While wind speeds dropped Thursday, forecasters reminded people that what makes Florence extremely dangerous are the potentially deadly storm surges, the expected mammoth coastal flooding and historic rainfall. The National Hurricane Center's best guess was that Florence would blow ashore as early as Friday afternoon around the North Carolina-South Carolina line, then slog its rainy way westward with a potential for catastrophic inland flooding that could swamp homes, businesses and farm fields. The National Hurricane Center said Florence was “forecast to be an extremely dangerous major hurricane when it nears the U.S. coast late Thursday and Friday.”

“This is not going to be a glancing blow,” the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Jeff Byard said in Washington. "A life-threatening storm surge is now highly likely along portions of the coastlines of South Carolina and North Carolina, and a storm surge warning is in effect for a portion of this area," the NHC said Thursday. Forecasters at the hurrican center warned that as much as 101 centimeters (40 inches) of rain could fall on some parts of North Carolina, with a storm surge of up to 4 meters (13 feet). Officials in several states have declared states of emergency, including in the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia and Maryland, where coastal areas are still recovering from summer storms.
Hurricane Florence makes landfall in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, as a Category 1 hurricane. and leaves over 895,000 residences and businesses without electrical power. A 105 mph (169 km/h) gust hits Wilmington, the strongest wind recorded there since Hurricane Helene in 1958. Florence is later downgraded to a Tropical Storm as it moves inland with sustained winds of 70 mph (110 km/h).