I'm not sure if everyone responding really read this all that carefully. There was absolutely no mention of smoke in this question. There was a "smell". If you drop an entire datacenter, you are easily looking at $100K+ in damages just to reset the room. So, getting a buddy and taking some time to look for the problem until it is found or until you actually are seeing smoke or other specific danger seems like a pretty reasonable course of action.
X times out of Y that's going to be a reasonable course of action. But one time someone will die, and at that point (because it's rare and we freak out at rare dangers) people will be up in arms about it, and about how stupid and irresponsible it is to not hit the button.
