The scenario in the linked post was not a "fire", and it makes sense that it would require going through the regular process. If it were a fire then where was the CEO after step one? Why didn't he (or the 'operations manager') send out an email to everybody informing them to bypass the regular process?

A fire is something like, "the site is down for XX% of customers!" (for a large value of XX) or the "the software is routing product to the wrong place!" No doubt a real fire would have been handled differently.