PARKERSBURG -- He came out of nowhere, showing up amid the debris of a destroyed neighborhood with trucks and cranes.

In the days the followed, Tad Skylar Agoglia and his crew from First Response Team cleared roads in tornado-ravaged Parkersburg, loaded pieces of felled homes and splintered trees into dump trucks and dug into the remains of city hall to retrieve records needed to get the government rolling again.

His people even helped dig graves for those killed by the EF-5 twister.

"He just came down and said 'What do you need?' We'd never met him and didn't know him, and he said "What can I do to help you?'" said Butler County Sheriff Jason Johnson.

"It was a huge boost," Johnson said.

Weeks later, as officials began to divvy up contracts for long-term clean-up, Agoglia and his people left, on their way to another disaster.

They asked for no payment and left no bill.

Now Agoglia is in the running to be CNN's Hero of 2008.

First Response Team, a non-profit organization that travels the United States bringing help in the wake of tornadoes, floods, mud slides and hurricanes, could receive a $100,000 prize from the cable news channel if Agoglia wins the honor.

A Long Island, N.Y., native, Agoglia first came up with the idea for the group after his for-profit clean-up company was hired to handle the Hurricane Katrina damage weeks after the storm struck.

He decided getting to the scene faster was providing immediate help was what he wanted to do.

"That is really where I got the idea. Coming in a month or two months later, you would look at the destruction and see the collapsed houses and see where the homes were flooded, and I would think to myself, what was it like when the storm came in," he said.

He poured money and equipment from the company into First Response, gave up his apartment and began to live on the road traveling from one disaster scene to the next. When he burned through his company money, he put his personal savings into the project.

"I basically just put everything into this, and the nature of developing the First Response Team, you have to stay on the road," Agoglia said.

"You've got a team of four to five guys and a million dollars worth of equipment, and your just going from one disaster to the next," he said.

The team tries to be at a disaster within the first day. It centralizes in the Missouri area during tornado and flood season and in the south when its time for hurricanes.

The crew brings everything from heavy equipment to chainsaws and pumps to cameras and microphones for finding people in rubble. They have satellite phones and laptop computers to help residents communicate. There's even a hovercraft to skim over debris-filled rivers.

There are 10 people on the slate for the CNN Heroes award, and the public can vote at the channel's Web site -- www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2008/cnn.heroes -- or at the organization's site -- www.firstresponseteam.org/heroes.

Others up for the award range from a woman who helps educate girls in Senegal to a runner who started a jogging program for the homeless in Philadelphia.

Contact Jeff Reinitz at (319) 291-1578 or jeff.reinitz@wcfcourier.com.