It is worth noting that not all companies take this approach. My current employer is one of the large energy companies, and tends to be somewhat obsessive about safety. We do a full evacuation drill of the office complex regularly, and there are several people on each floor who are "emergency response coordinators" (trained in CPR and FA) who check the entire floor after an alarm to make sure everyone has gone down the stairs. We are in earthquake country, and on each floor there is a closet with a cache of basic rescue gear (crow bars, axes, flashlights, etc), and there is also a cache of survival rations on site.