Went through six hurricanes back in the mid to late nineties in southeastern NC. Up here in Raleigh there have been a few brushes, but nothing major. At home though I live only 18 air miles from the ocean and it gets pretty rough, the worst windwise was Fran that Geoff mentioned and it was a Category 3 when the eye passed over my house. Rainwise though Floyd took the cake, I live just above sea level and wow, it was crazy how our fields flooded.
After Fran we spent over two weeks without power, which is not a big deal as we have various types of generators for my families nursery business, but we didn't have anything to run the AC and Southeast NC is HOT in the late summer as well as very humid especially after a storm like that. We had to cut our way out down our driveway as my parents live almost 3/4 of a mile off the main road and there are trees on one side of the driveway. I think there were almost twenty trees down, maybe more in that stretch.
Its a scary feeling watching those storms come in with very high winds, Fran was a 4 up until right before it made landfall. Luckily I don't think the water off coastal NC is as warm as in the gulf. I sympathize with the people down there, I have an idea of what they're going through, but on a smaller scale.
That was also before my flashaholism, which means that the best lights we had were either a Pelican Super Sabrelight or the Maglites. No led's or Surefire's at that point.
Sorry for the long post, I had just been thinking about all this recently with Katrina and now Rita and I've been remembering all the things that went down. One of the things I remember most was how many different people from other areas pitched in to help. The guys that restored power on my driveway were from upstate New York and we recieved help from various nurseries all over.