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When the bushfires of 1939 swept through 60,000 hectares of ACT forest and grazing land, Vivien Thomson's husband's grandfather helped fight the raging inferno on horseback. In 1952, when bushfires came perilously close to Canberra's urban edge, it was her father-in-law at the coalface. But when Mrs Thomson and her crew of firefighters turned up to extinguish a bush fire off the Monaro Highway back in 2002, there was something different about it. "It took us three times longer to put it out and it started to ring alarm bells in my head because I've been around the land for many years, there was just something that wasn't quite right," the rural firefighter and farmer said. "Then we had the 2003 fires in the ACT. You talk to any old timers on the fires and they'll pretty much tell you that season was like no other we'd ever seen before and I think they are going to become more frequent. "I was saying to the researchers afterwards, there's something here we're not getting, so that's when my interest in climate change and climate action started to pique because there was nothing that could explain what I was witnessing on the fire ground." New analysis published the journal Climatic Change has found the interval between extreme bushfires has shrunk. Researchers found the most devastating fires doubled in frequency from a 6.9 year interval in 1900 compared with 3.5 years in 2015. Researchers also found the conditions under which these "mega fires" develop are worsening. Mrs Thomson, who works with the Australian Firefighters Climate Alliance, said the impact of climate change on catastrophic bushfires needed to be taken seriously. "Fire seasons are increasing by two weeks a year and it's impacting our capacity for prevention and preparedness. We basically are just running into a response phase," Mrs Thomsen said. "The damage bills are going to get greater, the climate is not going to change in the short term and we're getting these short sharp extreme events." It comes as analysis from the Australian Firefighters Climate Alliance found the cost of extreme fires has spiked. Between 1987 and 1996 there was $88 million in insurance claims recorded as a result of serious fires. That figure increased fivefold to $491 million between 1997 and 2006, and more than doubled to $1.179 billion between 2007 and 2016. Ms Thomson said there was also a cost to communities razed by extreme fires. "The whole social structure when a fire goes through an area totally changes and people always say 'oh we'll get our community back' but it doesn't happen. You've to create a new community, you have to create a new normal and the emotional trauma that goes with that is absolutely devastating," she said

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