The controlled burn in the Cobaw State Forest was doomed to fail before the first match was struck.
The blaze jumped containment lines during extreme fire weather conditions in the first week of October.
It razed four homes and burned more than 3000 hectares of bush and farmland, forcing hundreds of residents to flee, before it was controlled.
On Thursday, it was government ministers and senior bureaucrats who had nowhere to hide at a public meeting in Lancefield following a scathing independent report on what went wrong.
The report, by West Australian fire expert Murray Carter, found the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) underestimated the danger posed by drought conditions and looming hot weather, and set the fire on September 30 aided only by a four-day weather forecast.
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The flawed risk assessment meant there was "minimal and inadequate" staffing to manage the fuel reduction burn in the face of seasonal outlooks and dry conditions that were not properly taken into account.
"From the first ignition, resources were insufficient to manage the burn and to maintain burn security when additional pressures such as escapes occurred," the report said.
Victorian Environment Minister Lisa Neville agreed DELWP got its risk assessment wrong, and said the government accepted all 22 recommendations from the report.
"It wasn't just the weather. It was about the dryness of the soil, the drought conditions, and that then led to a failure in further decisions in relation to how the fire was then resourced," she told reporters.
The government has ordered changes to the control burning program.
It is abandoning the target, set following the royal commission into the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, to ensure five per cent of all public land in Victoria has a controlled burn each year, instead taking a risk-based approach.
"But if you only look at a hectare base, given that nobody has yet been able to reach five per cent, it means we can do other work as well. This is going to give us the best chance of reducing fire risk," Ms Neville said.
Verne Glenwright of Lancefield, who lost everything on his farm but his house and who lost his home during the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983 said controlled burns are "a necessary evil".
But he said the Cobaw burn should not have been lit, and the report goes only part of the way to explain what happened.
"There are still people here today that are no wiser than they were at the start of the day and with no black and white answers, just grey answers," he said.
