She’s here.

The driving winds and pelting rain of Hurricane Florence’s western edge began to batter the Carolinas Thursday evening, giving the region a taste of what’s to come as the monster storm moves ashore Friday.

The one-time Category 4 tempest was downgraded to a Category 1 on Thursday night, but was still packing lethal 90-mph winds and the potential for 11-foot storm surges and 36 inches of rain, officials warned.

“This is a powerful storm that can kill,” said North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper in a Thursday press briefing. “Today, the threat becomes a reality.”

Experts agreed that despite Florence losing some power, it was still poised to sow just as much destruction — if not more.

“It truly is really about the whole size of the storm,” said National Hurricane Center head Ken Graham. “The larger and the slower the storm is, the greater the threat and the impact — and we have that.”

The worst may come as the gargantuan storm swirls past the shore and dumps days of rain on mountainous interiors, potentially creating disastrous mudslides.

One forecast from weather-tracking website Weathermodels.com predicts that over the next week, the Carolinas could see as much as 11 trillion gallons of rain.

By late Thursday afternoon, Florence’s fierce headwinds were already uprooting trees and tearing down power lines and had ripped the roof off of at least one building in coastal North Carolina, according to news station WGHP.

By early evening, nearly 70,000 residents were without electricity, according to North Carolina Emergency Management.

An estimated 3 million people across the Carolinas could be without power before long, and the lights may be out for weeks in some areas, said the region’s largest provider, Duke Energy.

Virginia and Georgia are also under states of emergency, but it’s North and South Carolina that are positioned to suffer the worst of the storm’s wrath.

About 1.7 million residents across the states’ coastlines are under mandatory evacuation orders, and tens of thousands of hospital patients and prison inmates have been moved out of Florence’s path.

The fates of the region’s furry, feathered and finned friends were also up in the air, as staffers scrambled to secure zoos, aquariums and animal shelters.

At the 500-acre North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro, workers shepherded a menagerie including elephants, giraffes and chimpanzees indoors, forming a sort of modern-day, stationary Noah’s Ark to ride out the flood.

Zookeepers and veterinarians resolved to hunker down with the creatures and see them through the storm.

Overcrowded animal shelters in some North Carolina districts were facing a more grim prospect: euthanizing animals that can’t be shipped to safety.

“We’re avoiding euthanasia at all costs,” Pender County Animal Shelter manager Jewel Horton told The Washington Post. “That’s why we’re begging for assistance.”

Horton pleaded for volunteers to take in their animals for the duration of the storm, a common, plaintive refrain at other shelters across the area.

As the last-minute evacuations and preparations of those who refuse to leave wound down, an eerie calm has settled over typically bustling Carolina cities.

Empty stores and packed houses alike sit boarded up and bolstered with sandbags, and the streets are empty with curfews in effect in many areas.

With more than 1,500 commercial airline flights in and out of the Carolinas canceled — and potentially many more to come — even the skies above sat empty, except for Florence’s foreboding cloud cover and rapidly strengthening rain.

Even the thousands of emergency workers on scene — ranging from power workers to National Guardsmen to cops, many of them volunteers from across the country — could only sit and wait for Florence to do its worst before they could do their best.

By late Thursday, people were, for better or for worse, locked into their decision: go or stay.

“It’s really dangerous out right now,” Beaufort, NC, Mayor Everette Newton told CNN. “They need to shelter in place.”

The police chief of Wrightsville Beach, vulnerable on a North Carolina barrier island, agreed that those who refused to leave were now on their own.

“I’m not going to put our personnel in harm’s way,” said Dan House. “Especially for people that we’ve already told to evacuate.”

He spent the last few hours of calm before the storm visiting those who stayed, collecting contact information for their next-of-kin.

Additional reporting by Tamar Lapin, with wires