Avalanches, earthquakes, hurricanes, bombings--all mean human tragedy unless rescuers respond within a moment's notice of disaster. Here are the latest advances in rescue technology, including: a Searchcam system that locates buried victims, and the Jaws of Life that can extricate a person from a crushed car in seconds.

Emergency room medicine has only been a recognized specialty since 1989, and it took close to two millennia to get to this point. We'll examine advances that led to the modern emergency room--from the Byzantine's establishment of the first hospitals around 1050 A.D. to today's telemedicine. The prognosis for its future looks good.

Fire! A blessing and curse to mankind. We'll review efforts to control this force from ancient Rome to today's thermal imaging cameras with special focus on U.S. history. We'll see how major fires in Chicago and San Francisco altered city planning, and relive the disasters at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and Cocoanut Grove.

Meet crime fighters who take on fiery killers. In Houston, visit the site of a suspicious fire with Fire Marshall Lalo Torres as he turns ashes into evidence. Former A.T.F. head Richard Garner explains motives behind the recent church fires. And at the California Criminalists Institute, John DeHaan trains special arson dogs.

Any fire raging out of control is a hazard, but when compounded with obstacles of extreme conditions, such as an oil well blowout or acres of forest ablaze, firefighters face new elements of danger. Meet a WWII London firefighter, "Hell Fighters" who squelch oil well infernos, and smokejumpers who parachute into forest fires.

Toxic traffic is everywhere! An average of 800,000 shipments of hazardous materials hit our highways and railways daily. From Wild West wooden crates filled with explosives to HAZMAT containers of nuclear waste, we shadow dangerous cargo. We ride shotgun on a hazardous material shipment that's tracked by satellites; hunt down the hush-hush "ghost fleet"--trucks carrying classified government materials; and board a Con-Air flight moving another kind of nasty stuff--dangerous felons!

Explore collisions that shake our world from the astronomic to the subatomic. Discover breakthroughs that could make the deadly sport of professional auto racing safer, visit a motorcycle crash test facility, and examine two-wheeled accidents.

Delves into the little-known, hugely important, multi-billion-dollar industry of product testing--where wrinkles get ironed out and goods are stripped of marketing and hype to see if they work. Meet product testers who serve as truth squads in an eccentric world of machines devised to "sneeze" at tissue paper and "sleep" on mattresses.