About 200 residents in the coastal town of New Bern have been rescued so far and were taken to shelters. Another 150 are awaiting rescue as the dangerous Category 1 hurricane moved ashore early Friday morning, according to New Bern Mayor Dana Outlaw.
"I think we kind of let our guards down," Zaytoun told "GMA" in a telephone interview Friday morning. "In hindsight, yes, I would have probably gotten out of here."
"I would say certain areas of New Bern are very desperate," Parker told ABC News in an interview early Friday. "There are people that can be trapped in water, in vehicles, on roofs. That's just the situation for anyone."
In some cases, the volunteers had to use air mattresses to float people to safety because the storm's gusty winds were toppling rescue boats.
"A lot of people did not get out, tried to drive out and a lot got stuck in conditions on the roads, so a lot of people we were rescuing from the tops of their vehicles," Todd Terrell, founder of the Baton Rouge-based United Cajun Navy, said on "GMA."
If you got stuck in "conditions" on the roads and wound up on the top of your vehicle, then obviously you didn't leave in the several days you had when the roads were clear. And those 350 people talked about in the beginning were in a mandatory evac area. Maybe they listened to Rush Limbaugh, who was on the radio again yesterday berating the hurricane forecasters and downplaying the danger. He was saying, look, it's already a cat 2 now, not a 4, they are always wrong about this, they always over blow it, get people running out to buy water, then it turns out to not be nearly as bad as they said. Look how it was supposed to hit in NC, now it's shifted, they were wrong about that. Blah, blah, blah. What a totally irresponsible crap head. I'll bet some of those people stuck on their roofs were listening to him.