There was cause for celebration amid the destruction of Cyclone Yasi in Australia on Thursday - the birth of a baby girl, born during the height of the storm.
Her proud parents Christian Pruss from Germany and his wife Akiko presented their newborn daughter, Lucia to the media at a packed evacuation centre in Cairns.
Akiko, who is Japanese, gave birth just before dawn local time in a makeshift delivery room at the centre, with the help of British midwife Carol Weeks who was holidaying in the region.
Mrs Weeks, who works in the ante natal department of a hospital in Watford, England, was hailed a "heroine" by Queensland premier Anna Bligh for her help during the birth.
She was in Australia with her husband Andrew on a trip to mark their 25th wedding anniversary.
Local councillor Linda Cooper said the circumstances faced by Mrs Pruss had been incredible.
"She's either got a very high pain threshold or she's a very strong woman, but obviously we've got no pain relief or anything here for her, so a very natural birth in the most unnatural of circumstances," she said.
She smilingly added that Akiko had rejected her suggestion to call the baby Yasi in memory of the storm that marked her dramatic entry into the world.
Overnight, Yasi, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in Australia with winds up to 282 kilometres per hour, pulled houses apart and snapped power poles as it ripped across flood-sodden Queensland state.
Tidal surges sent waves crashing ashore two blocks into seaside communities, several small towns directly under the cyclone's eye were devastated and banana and sugarcane crops were shredded.
Residents and officials were amazed and relieved that no one was reported killed.
Officials had issued days of increasingly dire warnings and said lives were spared because people followed instructions. They were told to flee to evacuation centres or bunker themselves at home in dozens of cities and towns in Cyclone Yasi's path on the far northeast coast.
Hundreds of houses were destroyed or seriously damaged, and homes of thousands more people would be barely inhabitable until the wreckage was cleared, officials said.
Officials kept more than 10,000 people who spent the night encamped in evacuation centres set up in shopping malls and other heavy-built locations inside.
The region is considered a tourist gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, but whether the storm caused damage to the reef was not yet known. Experts say that cyclones can cause localised reef damage as they cross over and that under normal circumstances they will recover.
The disaster zone was North of Australia's worst flooding in decades, which swamped an area in Queensland state the size and Germany and France combined and killed 35 people during weeks of high water until last month.
The government has already announced a special tax nationwide to help pay for the earlier flooding.
Australia's huge, sparsely populated tropical North is battered annually by about six cyclones, called typhoons throughout much of Asia and hurricanes in the Western hemisphere. Building codes have been strengthened since Cyclone Tracy devastated the city of Darwin in 1974, killing 71 in one of Australia's deadliest natural disasters.
APTN