That's the million dollar question. As an individual, you need information to make good decisions. In places and situations where there's a major storm and a lot of media coverage, you can get a sense of what's going on. That wasn't the case here.

Sometimes taking individual action without information is the wrong thing to do. If you look at the photo in this Globe & Mail article, you can see people bugging out into the fire, on a highway that had been technically closed but not yet barricaded.

The speed at which this fire went sideways (as little as an hour by some reports) seems to have caught the agency responsible flat-footed. Strong winds were in the forecast, but they came in considerably faster. Some people from the town say alerts/evacuation should have started the night before. They have a point. There was a major communication breakdown. The only bright spot is that no lives have been lost.