Awesome / Rescue 911

• Virtually the entire show. Aside from the very well-done recreations of the incidents, just about every story involves everyday people or emergency personnel stepping up to save lives. For example, this police officer who chased down a pair of runaway boxcars that collided with a car and bringing them to a halt before they crushed the vehicle against a bridge.
• Here's a nice, specific, badass example. A boy is attacked by a crocodile. He is rescued by, among other people, his father, who gets his arm bitten clean off by said croc. The father proceeds to oversee his son's care, does everything he can to help, and at the end of the segment we learn that he saved his son by punching the crocodile in the face until it let go of the son and attacked the father instead. In a show built basically out of Real Life Big Damn Heroes moments, he's pretty much at the top.
• A woman is assaulted by a rapist her son accidentally let into the house. She forestalls him by asking him to let her put her son in another room, then says she needs to call work and tell them she'll be late. He watches her dial, so she calls a friend and manages to ask him to come over without letting the intruder know who she's talking to. Then, when he looks away for a moment, she hangs up and dials 911, still without him realizing anything was amiss. Keep in mind that she's doing all this having just been attacked, with the person who attacked her standing over her shoulder.
• Two days shy of his fourth birthday, Jameson calls 911 after his mom begins choking on a cough drop.(His parents had installed a phone in the bathroom—the kitchen phone was out of his reach—several months earlier when his mom was pregnant, in case she went into labor when her husband was at work.) His mother was amazed that he was able to dial for help on his own initiative, since the only script she'd ever given him was 'My Mom's having a baby, please send help.'
  Peggy Rodgers: It just dawned on me what he did - my son saved my life.
• The episode wherein two school buses carrying firefighters were going down a mountain, and one of them had a brakes failure. The way he managed to stop the bus is nothing short of impressive.
• A kid performed CPR on a logger.
• The Maui sand truck save wherein the rescuers dig the couple out of the sand, and the girl is unharmed.
• Lynne from "911 He's Not an Officer" refused to be a victim, and turned the tables on her would-be attacker (and was pretty darn gutsy given how the situation could have potentially gone south):
  • A man in a Mustang attempts to pull Lynne over by flashing a badge. Suspicious as to why an off-duty or undercover officer would want to pull her over for some slight speeding, she uses her ace in the hole: a mobile phone, something pretty rare in 1991.
  • Upon seeing her grab the phone, the suspect flees. Lynne tells the 911 operator the man's license plate number, and follows him closely, relaying the street names to dispatchers (who confirm that the car doesn't belong to a cop).
  • She eventually chases him to a parking garage, where he is trapped. Her descriptions of the man help the police to find and arrest him minutes later for Impersonating an Officer.
• One six year old girl with a diabetic father senses something is amiss when she notices him driving fast and swerving into the wrong lanes. At home, she unsuccessfully tries to get him to eat; after he passes out on the couch, she calls 911, and even tells the dispatcher, "My daddy's low, he's diabetic."
• Another episode has a three year old hit the speed dial for a family friend because he couldn't wake his mom up. It turns out that his mom had accidentally been inhaling too much gas from a leaking stove.
• A young boy named calls 911 when his father is knocked unconscious falling down the stairs. Stevie, who is only about six or seven, calmly listens to the dispatcher's directions to check if he's breathing and try and stop the bleeding from his head wound. The dispatcher later said that he was so repsondant that she had total confidence that if the father had stopped breathing, he would have been able to deal with it.
• When one teenager falls from a tree, his friends immediately know what to do because of their first aid training from the Boy Scouts. The first responder at the boy's side was surprised that his pulse and blood pressure were as stable as they were, and that everything that could have been done prior to his arrival the boys had already done for him.
  Paramedic: There's just no question that they're the ones that saved his life.
• A blind man has a fire in his apartment in the middle of the night. Unable to put it out, with the help of his guide dog, he nonetheless manages to alert all the other fourteen people living in the six-unit building.
• Another fire example in "Sister Saves Siblings." Kudos to her especially for staying so calm and not running back into the house after her little brother when he goes back inside in a panic.
• In one story, a mother is driving with her children when she faints. Her 11-year-old daughter, who's in the passenger seat, remembers an episode of Rescue 911 and is able to prevent the car from crashing into a pole, stops the car, and calls 911, all with a clear head.
• In one episode, an apartment complex caught fire with an old lady and eight babies trapped on the third floor. She was forced to literally drop the babies out of the third floor into the arms of a crowd of men at the bottom. This clip was actually in the opening.
• One episode in the "100 lives saved" special depicted a carbon monoxide leak where someone took his wife to the hospital. An episode about Carbon Monoxide aired in the ER waiting room - and the woman said "Hey, I think that's what I had". He rushes home and is able to pull all three kids out.
• Awesome Music: The theme song.