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We all know high heels can be hazardous, but it seems that what you wear can actually impact your ability to respond during an emergency situation. 
Yesterday, the city conducted a mass rush-hour evacuation. Nearly 3,000 participants took part in the drill, the Tribune reported. The drill took less than an hour, but emergency planning chief Cortez Trotter said things could have moved faster were it not for some pointy toed, spike-heeled hindrances.
Trotter told the Tribune several women took more than 40 flights of stairs in heels, which slowed the evacuation, not to mention hurt their feet. We know it can be hard enough just to walk normally in heels, let alone do some serious stairmastering.
"Just walking down four, five flights of stairs, you'd better have the right shoes," the always sensibly dressed Mayor Daley said.
Overall, the drill went smoothly, but many other non-footwear-related lessons were learned, such as where the stairwells and emergency exits were located. Always good to know.
Although Chicagoist is quite fond of heels, we’re even more appreciative of survival. So, the overarching message of this What Not To Wear: Emergency Evacuation edition – keep a pair of flats at your desk. Your feet, and the evacuees behind you, will thank you.
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this was supposed to be an emergency drill. in a genuine emergency, people are going to be wearing all sorts of impractical shit. this is a decent way of gauging just how long it's going to take the fashionistas of the world to get the fuck out of a collapsing highrise.
alternatively, you *could* not wear shoes that make you want to saw your feet off at the ankle. women at large seem to have a big problem with that.
Why on earth didn't they just remove their heels, carry them down the stairs, then put them back on before going outside? The mind boggles.
Couldn't these morons tell they were slowing things down? It's just common courtesy.
Fashion before function, always... even if it means sacrificing the lives of thousands of others.
heels are so stupid. extra pointy toed shoes are even more stupid. it makes me ashamed to be a girl to see women hobbling painfully around in pointy-toed, high-heeled contraptions instead of wearing shoes in which you can walk. which i do believe is the *point* of shoes.
morons.
Give them credit for at least taking part in the exercise. Because when the big one comes, there's going to be a lot of screaming bitches in them stairwells because they won't know what to do, where to go, and what to bring with. The fire marshall that conducts tests in our building has us go down a few flights for a drill and screams at anyone with a cup of coffee in their hands and points at anyone in heels and tells them to take them off the next time.
You KNOW if it was the real deal it would be barefoot and feets don't fail me now all the way.