Having weathered many, many hurricanes, it's a bit misleading to say this. The strength of a hurricane is basically an exponential decay function of distance from the eye. The eye wall destroys things. The immediate surrounding rain bands are equivalent to a bad, windy thunderstorm and throw stuff around (though they can reach heavily damaging strength in a Cat 4 or 5). The outer rain bands are any other rainstorm. Flooding is the most likely source of damage, and storm surge is a function of which side of the storm hits you as it turns counter-clockwise.