I was once holding short of the north runway at KMIA one night and a 737 across the runway on a parallel taxiway called saying that they had a fire in the cockpit and were evacuating the passengers via the emergency slides.
We saw the emergency exits open, the main cabin doors open, the slides deploy and then escape slides come out and inflate. Then here came the passengers down the slides. My God, I didn’t know a 737 could carry that many passengers, they were like ants running away from an anthill. There were running away in about every direction, some heading toward the active runway.
So I turned on my landing lights (727) so the area would illuminated and then the tower cleared us for takeoff. The tower did not know the 737 was spewing passengers all over that end of the airport. Well that made things interesting. My co-pilot called the tower back and told them considering everything, we would wait until all the people running around were corralled. After our call the tower realized that the 737 was evacuating its passengers.
I have to say that after the CFR folks were notified their response was extremely rapid. But it still took 30 minutes before we could make an intersection takeoff from about 2,000 feet down the end of the runway. In this case, after the CFR crews handled the fire, which was just smoke in the cockpit, they and the airport police did help round up the passengers and move them to a safe area where they were loaded on busses.
By the way, this happened the night after hurricane Andrews destroyed the southern half of the Miami area the previous night.