Hurricane Florence is inching along after making landfall in North Carolina, trapping people in flooded homes and promising days of destruction and human suffering to come.

The Category 1 hurricane's storm surges, punishing winds and rain are turning some towns into rushing rivers — and the storm is expected to crawl over parts of the Carolinas into the weekend, pounding some of the same areas over and over.

“It's getting worse,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said late Friday morning. “The storm is going to continue its violent grind across our state for days.”

In the besieged North Carolina city of New Bern alone, rescuers by mid-morning Friday had plucked more than 200 people from rising waters, but about 150 more had to wait as conditions worsened and a storm surge reached 10 feet, officials said.

Florence's rain will reach 40 inches in some parts of the Carolinas, forecasters said. Rainfall totals will be similar to those in hurricanes Dennis and Floyd in 1999, Chris Wamsley of the National Weather Service said Friday morning.

“The only difference is, back then it was within 14 days,” he said. With Florence, “we're looking at the same amount of rainfall in three days.”

By Friday morning, Florence already had:

• Sapped power to more than 620,000 customers in North and South Carolina, emergency officials said.

• Forced 26,000 people into more than 200 emergency shelters across the Carolinas.

• Forced more than 60 people to evacuate a hotel in Jacksonville, North Carolina, after part of the roof collapsed, city officials said.

• Prompted 4,000 National Guard soldiers and 40,000 electric workers to mobilize in response.

• Cancelled more than 1,100 flights along the East Coast on Friday and Saturday.

In Jacksonville, North Carolina, city officials posted photos of toppled gas pumps and a downed trees early Friday, warning residents to take shelter and avoid roadways.

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.

Florence is one of four named storms in the Atlantic.