Yes, NC really got creamed by Floyd. What I remember from the east coast of Florida is that we did the evac since it was supposed to travel up the coast - but s/he missed us. Floyd stayed about 75 miles offshore, paralleling the coast, and being on the back-side our weather was pleasant. All the people who evacuated said “never again,” the absolute wrong lesson to learn from a near hit. Of course, the Charlie / Frances / Ivan / Jeanne season wised up many.
From 1996 beginning with Bertha and Fran through 1999 we had several hurricanes come right through our NC-SC border coastal area. We were calling ourselves Hurricane Alley.
As NN mentioned, the successive rains from multiple storms close together really exacerbated the damage from Floyd. After a long drought we’ve just had heavy rains again recently and there’s a lot of surface water that hasn’t run off yet, so if Irene dumps a lot more it’ll be worse this time as well.