One can imagine that fingerprint biometrics will have helped some organisations, businesses, schools and hospitals to locate where people were when the huge earthquake and tsunami waves stuck.
Apart from natural disasters impacting huge territories, they are also very likely to help in accidents or attacks.
As a rule, the more dangerous a given workplace, the more rigorous are the identification and access control protocols. Power plants and military bases spring immediately to mind.
One protocol developed to assist responders in the event of an emergency has staff leave their ID badges at pre-determined locations upon their departure from the site. If followed, this procedure is a good tool for deducing how many people are missing and who they are. After all, no one is going to require that people use the access control procedures developed for normal operations while fleeing a burning building.
But having better information on the last known position of the missing not only makes their recovery more likely, it makes first responders safer by allowing them to do their job more efficiently.
Admittedly, you don't need biometrics to do this (prox cards can work, too), but you do need rigorous access control, intelligent systems that can prepare the relevant information in near real time, and established emergency protocols that make the information actionable.
