There is no comprehending the sound and fury of the flooding that pulverised Brisbane

‘Turning down one last hill, I saw the river where it shouldn’t be. Slowly sinking beneath it was my apartment block,’ writes Andrew Stafford of flooding in St Lucia, Brisbane. Photograph: Andrew Stafford

The things that will stay with me about the weather event and subsequent flooding that engulfed Brisbane and south-east Queensland over the weekend was how rapidly it unfolded, its capricious unpredictability and extreme violence.

This was not a repeat of the 2011 disaster, which I also lived through, and the captains of hindsight suggesting this – in a simplistic and premature attempt to assign blame – are making a false equivalence.