If we can't bring our Gameboys, the terrorists have already won
From AP/Yahoo:

Two days before the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Los Angeles held its largest-ever disaster drill, evacuating about 10,000 people from downtown buildings....

As many as 20,000 people had been expected to take part in the drill but many employees stayed home, authorities said. Workers had been notified of the drill far in advance and some brought bag lunches, lawn chairs and even portable video game consoles....

Dave Margolias, a contractor who was among those evacuated, called the drill inconvenient but necessary: "If you don't do this, you won't be prepared when something really happens," he said.

"I think that now that we've done it once, everybody will know where to go," said another worker, Holly Beckner.

True, but it defies sanity to claim, as Mayor Hahn did, that [t]he drill presents a unique opportunity to conduct a realistic evacuation. This quote is taken from a self-congratulatory press release, which somehow forgot to mention the lawn chairs. The press release then refers to "[a] map with information about road closures."

On the other hand, they did face the problem of evacuating 9,000+ people in this exercise. If you're going to evacuate that many people, you can't just announce it on the spur of the moment - that would cause a REAL incident.

On the other other hand, why was it necessary to conduct a multi-building evacuation? If you really want to test an office's evacuation procedures, do it on a floor-by-floor basis. The only reason to have a multi-building evacuation is to test the capabilities of the emergency response team itself - and that can easily be simulated.

If anyone has stories from the front lines of the evacuation, please post them in the comments.