Hurricane Florence made landfall on Friday morning in Wrightsville, North Carolina bringing with it life-threatening storm surges and 90mph winds.

While forecasters have been keeping a close eye on the storm from the ground, the International Space Station watched the slow-moving hurricane make landfall from above.

At the time, the storm carried winds of about 90 miles per hour (145 km/h), making it a Category 1 storm, but that ranking belies the hurricane's massive clouds and the downpour it is visiting on the coastline, with some areas already drenched in 30 inches (76 centimeters) of rain.

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Wright is far from the only resident in the Carolinas that chose to weather Hurricane Florence, which has since been downgraded to a tropical storm, though many who chose to stay are starting to reconsider their decision of sticking around for what North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper called a "1,000-year event".

The effects of Hurricane Florence have already arrived on the East Coast of the United States, where massive floods have already begun and as much asthe National Hurricane Center forecasts 40 inches of rain and 11 feet of flooding from the storm surge.

"We've got to quickly understand the damage that's been done to the transportation systems, the communication systems, the power systems, and we are positioning, and have bene positioned for multiple days now, to get those critical lifelines back up and stable as quickly as we can", he said. Officials in South Carolina's Craven County say conditions are much worse than some residents expected, with almost 500 people calling the local emergency services hotline asking for help.

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How many people will it affect?

The storm splintered buildings and trapping hundreds of people in high water as it settled in for what could be a long and extraordinarily destructive drenching.

Coastal streets flowed with ocean water, and more than 460,000 homes and businesses were without power, mostly in North Carolina, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks the nation's electrical grid.

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"Hurricane Florence is powerful, slow and relentless", he said. "Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 80 miles (130 km) from the centre and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 195 miles (315 km)".

Forecasters said "catastrophic" freshwater flooding was expected along waterways far from the coast of North and SC.

So far, a state of emergency has been declared in five states - South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Maryland and Washington DC. The vivid presentation - powered by the Unreal Engine, most commonly used in video games - seems likely to serve as a more pressing demonstration of the storm's threat than a mere written warning, and that's vitally important for folks in impacted areas. "If you're called to go, you need to go". "And since we're already on high ground, those two things together kind of help insulate us a little more than, I would say, others".

ISS images show massive Hurricane Florence from 400 km up
Another Wilmington resident said she does not want to leave because she is afraid to see what she would be coming back to. The center downgraded Florence to a Category 1 hurricane, but warned that it still carried "very risky winds".