While Mid-Michigan is hundreds of miles away from Florence, many people here have family members there.
"As a parent, you want your child to be safe, you don't want them in the eye of something that they have no control over," Carrie Lockwood said.
Lockwood says that her daughter, Kaleigh is in the Marines and stationed in North Carolina. She says the storm caused flooding up into the second story of her daughter's barracks in addition to power outages. Lockwood's daughter had the option of going home as the storm approached, but choose to stay when her friend and fellow Marine who was unable to leave.
"She was not going to leave her by herself, and that made me proud to know that she was going to sacrifice herself to keep somebody else calm and happy."
Another Mid-Michigan native also rode out the storm. Tom Lindow spoke with me over the phone about what he experienced during Florence.
"I would much rather live through a tornado than this. It's constant. Just hours and hours. The wind blowing sideways and the rain blowing sideways, its a little concerning," Lindow said.
Lindow lives in Fayetteville and works for the government as a Department of Defense employee. He said so far his area has had about four inches of rain, with another five expected today. He says the most stressful part was waiting and hoping the powerful winds wouldn't cause trees to fall on his house.
"Just seeing the constant wind and rain, and the winds gusts of over 70 mph. We were lucky nothing like that happened," Lindow said.
Lindow says he was also impressed with the amount of help the area was getting. Lockwood says that she is happy her daughter is okay, and now has a tale to tell.
"It was very crazy. But she can say that she survived through Hurricane Florence," she said.
