Watch Hurricane Florence Winds Rip Gas Station Canopy Apart

Video from Hurricane Florence shows a BP canopy being ripped from the ground by the winds before [...]

By Daniel S. Levine

Video from Hurricane Florence shows a BP canopy being ripped from the ground by the winds before the storm made landfall in North Carolina.

The footage, shot by storm chaser Chris Collura and published by Fox News, was taken Thursday night in Topsail Beach, a town in Pender County along the coast.

"This hurricane went from zero to crazy in no time," Aaron Rigsby, another storm chaser, told CBS News. "We were sitting maybe with maybe 30 mph gusts and then all of a sudden we started getting blasted with 80 mph winds. We had winds sustained at 80, 90 mph gusting up to 100 mph."

Rugsby said there was a "tremendous" amount of debris being tossed around by the winds, including sheet metal and roofs. He also compared it to Hurricane Harvey, the slow-moving storm that caused record flooding in Houston last year.

"The thing that's so similar about this, not necessarily the intensity, is it's behaving a lot like Hurricane Harvey last year, how it's just kind of parking here, slowly moving, dumping tremendous amounts of rain and some of these areas could see 20 to even 30 inches of rain by the time it's all said and done," Rigsby explained.

The storm has claimed the lives of at least five people so far. Wilmington, North Carolina police confirmed that a mother and infant were killed when a tree fell on their house. Another person was killed in Hempstead when she suffered a heart attack. Emergency personnel were not able to get to her home because of downed trees blocked the road.

Two other deaths were reported in Lenoir County, reports the Kinston Free Press. A 78-year-old man was electrocuted when he tried to connect two extension cords during the rain. A 77-year-old man was found dead in his home after wind blew him down while he was checking on his dogs.

According to Weather.com, more than 635,000 homes and residences have lost power and more than 12,000 people are already in 126 evacuation shelters.

In its 5 p.m. ET public advisory, the National Hurricane Center reported that the storm's maximum sustained winds are now at 70 mph. The massive storm is located about 50 miles west-southwest of Wilmington and is moving at just 3 mph. With the storm moving that slow, forecasters are expecting feet of rain instead of inches to be pouring over the Carolinas.

"A slow westward to west-southwestward motion is expected through Saturday. On the forecast track, the center of Florence will move farther inland across extreme southeastern North Carolina this evening, and across extreme eastern South Carolina tonight and Saturday. Florence will then move generally northward across the western Carolinas and the central Appalachian Mountains early next week," the advisory reads.

Photo credit: Twitter / @FoxNews

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