40 Acts of Valor: Stories of Selfless Heroes

Vince Coleman was a railway dispatcher in Halifax during the 1917 Great Halifax Explosion. He gave up his life in order to warn an incoming train of an imminent explosion. His telegraph said, "Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys." He saved 300 lives.

Leroy Colombo was a deaf lifeguard who overcame being paralyzed as a child by swimming. He saved more than 900 lives in his career, which is a record. His swimming talent and use of sight rather than sound to identify drowning swimmers allowed him to save people other lifeguards would have missed.

Miki Endo, a Japanese emergency worker, saved thousands of lives during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami by warning the people of Minamisanriku via the Emergency Broadcast System. She did not leave her spot and was eventually killed in the subsequent disaster.

Welles Crowther was a 24-year-old equities trader who saved 12 people during the 911 attacks and went back in to save more before never being seen again.

In 2010, a retired Gurkha soldier of the Indian Army, Bishnu Shrestha, was returning to his village in a train when it was hijacked by armed robbers. When they tried to rape a young teen in front of him, he brandished his Kukri blade and attacked all 40 captors. He managed to kill three men and injure eight before he was subdued. The rest of the robbers quickly panicked and dispersed.

In 2001, breast milk from a woman named Faustina Mercedes saved 16 people lost at sea. Two days after their food ran out, she told her sister to try her milk. She felt better and offered it to everyone else. The 8 men and 7 women took turns sucking her breasts and were able to survive for 7 more days until currents pushed the boat to shore.

An Italian security guard named Pierlucio Tinazzi is credited with saving 10 people from the 1999 Mont Blanc Tunnel fire. He donned breathing equipment and drove into the tunnel on his motorcycle. It was later found melted into the pavement. He died attempting to rescue a truck driver after dragging his unconscious body behind a fire door.

Shavarsh Karapetyan, a 17-time world swimming champion from Armenia, was on a 12-mile run in 1976 when he heard a crash and saw a bus sink into a lake. He dove 33 feet deep, rescuing 20 people, one at a time, from the frigid and sewage-infested water. His career as a professional swimmer ended after this heroic act due to two-sided pneumonia and blood contamination that put him in a coma. This didn't stop him from saving more people nine years later, when he rushed into a burning hospital to save people trapped inside. He suffered severe burns during the rescue.

During the Rwandan Genocide, an old Rwandan woman named Zura Karuhimbi saved the lives of over 100 Tutsis by hiding them in her home and scaring away Hutus by pretending to be a witch and saying her home was haunted and full of ghosts.

A stationmaster named Ghulam Dastagir at the Bhopal railway station refused to leave his post during the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy. He prevented any trains from stopping at the station, saving thousands of lives even as his colleagues started dying around him. He survived the disaster, but spent the next two decades in and out of hospitals as a result of his prolonged exposure to the gas.