More than 100 people were waiting to be rescued from homes and vehicles Friday morning in New Bern, N.C., after Hurricane Florence brought severe flooding to the area.

Some of the worst flooding from the monster storm was in the town of New Bern, North Carolina, where the Neuse River overflowed its banks, flooding streets and trapping many people in their homes.

More than 60 people had to be pulled from a collapsing cinderblock motel at the height of the storm.

Florence flattened trees, crumbled roads and knocked out power to more than 700,000 homes and businesses, and the assault wasn't near an end.

"There's a great temptation to want to go back east and to view you property", he said.

Hurricane Florence is "wreaking havoc" along the U.S. coast and could wipe out entire communities, North Carolina's governor has warned. When Hurricane Florence started battering eastern North Carolina with record rainfall, the Neuse and Trent rivers began to swell - and combined with high tide, made for unsafe flooding and dramatic rescues.

A mother and baby were killed when a tree fell on a house, according to a tweet from Wilmington police.

Two people in Lenoir County were killed: a 78-year-old Kinston man who was electrocuted when connecting extension cords in the rain and a 77-year-old man who was blown down by the wind when he went to check on his hunting dogs.

Still, he said: "I feel like the dumbest human being who ever walked the face of the earth".

New Bern is a city along the Neuse River near the Atlantic coast, about 90 miles (145 kilometers) northeast of Wrightsville Beach, where Florence made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane at 7:15 a.m. Friday. It came ashore along a mostly boarded-up, emptied-out stretch of coastline.

By early afternoon, Florence's winds had weakened to 75 miles per hour, just barely a hurricane and well below the storm's terrifying Category 4 peak of 140 miles per hour earlier in the week. But it was clear that this was really about the water, not the wind.

Florence is still moving very slowly inland.

The river swamped the town after Hurricane Matthew came through two years ago: One church parishioner drowned during that storm, more than 700 families were displaced from their homes, and two of the city's largest public housing projects were destroyed, Foreman said. Other communities got well over a foot. It said it was located about 50 miles (65 km) west of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and forecasters predicted a slow westward march. Forecasters say "it can not be emphasized enough that the most serious hazard posed by the slow-moving storm is extremely heavy rainfall, which will cause disastrous flooding that will be spreading inland".

Authorities warned too of the threat of mudslides and the risk of environmental havoc from floodwaters washing over industrial waste sites and pig farms.

The death toll from the hurricane-turned-tropical storm has now climbed to 11. That's enough to fill the Chesapeake Bay or cover the entire state of Texas with almost 4 inches of water, he calculated.

North Carolina alone is forecast to get 9.6 trillion gallons, enough to cover the Tar Heel state to a depth of about 10 inches (25 centimeters).

Pieces of torn-apart buildings flew through the air. The few cars out on a main street in Wilmington had to swerve to avoid fallen trees, metal debris and power lines.

The Wilmington airport had a wind gust clocked at 105 miles per hour (169 kph), the highest since Hurricane Helene in 1958. Almost 2 million Americans live within a mile of the most at-risk sites.

But as winds diminished, it moved quicker across the Carolinas.

The state's transportation secretary, James Trogdon, said the state may see "flood events" that normally only occur once every 1,000 years.

"You can't get over till we have power and we have sewer up and running", said the retired teacher and real estate agent, who rode out the hurricane in an inland hotel. "Right now, we are thinking that there will tens of thousands of homes that are going to be damaged", he said. "It'll be ugly, but we'll get through it", Long told NBC's "Meet The Press".

The total bill for damage from Florence could eventually reach $10 billion to $20 billion, said Chuck Watson, a disaster researcher at Enki Research in Savannah, Georgia.