A 7.1 magnitude earthquake rocks Los Angeles and there are emergencies all over the place. The crazy highlights: a rescue of a woman dangling from the window of a skyscraper, saving a man from a burning truck using cement (it comes full circle), and saving an all-star high school basketball player whose leg is trapped under debris that is also holding up a large section of the ceiling. There's a lot, and it goes over two episodes.
This bout of craziness actually has to do with several normal 911 calls that take a terrible turn. When Athena and 911 operator Maddie Buckley (Hewitt) save a chef who's been shot in the kitchen of his restaurant, they find out that he tried calling 911 and the operator hung up on him. After some digging, they learn that Maddie's colleague Gloria, a seemingly "perfect" dispatcher at the call centre, has been hanging up on emergency calls for ages! After Gloria gets fired, she launches a campaign to mentally torture Maddie for getting her fired. She winds up getting into an car accident while harassing Maddie over the dispatcher line and has a break down. Maddie gets emergency services to rescue her, which is supposed to teach us not to let the awfulness of the world get us down and that there is still good out there. But it also teaches us that when some people snap, they snap.