I've not talked to Rick, but the NC Triangle area was spared much of the worst of Hurricane Florence. We got about 4" rain and wind gusts stayed mostly below 30mph.
We have friends and work colleagues that stayed down on the coast where the eye went right over them. Scary!
The worst of it is still to come as rain runoff causes rivers to overflow. After Floyd the waters continued to rise for a week after the storm and stayed up for a month. A stretch of I40 was 3 feet underwater. Flo dumped much more rain than Floyd.