One of the problems with preparing a fairly light-hearted podcast like the Flat Chat Wrap is that there are a lot of serious issues around that you just can’t ignore but you don’t want to trivialise.Right now the Eastern states are dealing with the immediate problem of devastating floods or their aftermath. What does this have to do with apartment living?We hear about the smart thinking, fast-moving residents of one block who successfully prevented their two-storey underground car park becoming a watery grave for their cars.Then there’s the issue of what happens in multi-storey blocks when the power to the lifts is knocked out?And we ask the question, should we even be allowing people to build houses in flood plains and if not, where can they live? Are apartments the answer?Lightening the tone, we have a chat about the by-laws we loath and those we wish we had.And we even have something nice to say about Airbnb, in the context of that other major story dominating the news, Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.TRANSCRIPT IN FULLJimmy 00:00If there's two stories we can't avoid at the moment, it's the floods and...Sue 00:06Shane Warne.Jimmy 00:07The third story is Shane Warne, yes. I was just reading; he used to have a nightclub in his basement.Sue 00:15Yes, I think his parties were quite legendary.Jimmy 00:18Look, he lived life to the full. It's tragic that he's gone, but we're not going to be talking about him anymore, but we are going to be talking about floods; a tiny little story about Ukraine and we're going to be talking about bylaws, and the bylaws you wish you didn't have and you wish you did have. I'm Jimmy Thomson, I write the Flat Chat column for the Australian Financial Review.Sue 00:44And I'm Sue Williams, I write about property for Domain.Jimmy 00:47And this is the Flat Chat Wrap.[MUSIC]JimmyIt looks like the whole of the eastern seaboard has been affected by floods in the past week. Absolutely horrendous, Biblical floods. While one is tempted to say "hey, do you believe in climate change now," the fact is that ordinary people are suffering a lot and businesses are being destroyed.Sue 01:27Absolutely and many of them, have only just got over the floods of a few years ago and they're now having to clean up again, from floods now, which must be absolutely heartbreaking.Jimmy 01:36There's a couple of aspects of this that interest me from a strata point of view and one of them is, what happens to strata buildings, when the floods knock out electricity?Sue 01:47And also, in Brisbane (which is obviously, always badly affected by floods); did you hear about one apartment building in New Farm in Brisbane, where the residents all realised that the Brisbane River was about to break it's banks, so they rushed down to the basement and managed to erect these makeshift barriers, to hold the water back, which actually saved the basement of the building, because they had two levels of underground car parking, which would have both been underwater, had they not all rushed to help? They did it within 30 minutes... Isn't that clever?Jimmy 02:23Well, somebody should employ them now, to develop something for all the other buildings that might be affected. You
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Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.
