November 2013 Challenge Magazine

Agoglia made millions from his disaster recovery company before starting First Response in 2007. He now helps those in need for free. and their plasma cutter to slice through the steel so survivors could be rescued. They set up light towers so they could work through the night and used Caterpillar machines to move debris.

“We were finding things from the neighborhood that had been blown into the school,” Hayes remembers. “It was nice to have Tad and his equipment and expertise running the show.”

That night Agoglia and his team used their thermal imaging camera, which picks up body heat, as they followed firefighters through the neighborhood looking for survivors. “Everything was covered with shingles, grass, mud and boards,” Hayes says.

“Tad could see if someone was trapped.”

The First Response Team ended up spending more than a month working with the people of Moore to help them salvage what they could. “You have to admire his spirit,” Hayes says. “He was doing it all for free. That kept us motivated.”

Helping victims of natural disasters is a calling for Agoglia. A native of Long Island, N.Y., he opened a for-profit company called Disaster Recovery Solutions after graduating from college with a master’s degree in theology. “I always had an interest in business and I have a love for equipment and trucks,” he says. “I started an excavation company and then I started using heavy equipment to help clean up after disasters.”

Agoglia’s business took off, making him a millionaire in his 20s, but he felt there was something missing in his life, especially after losing his father to cancer just a year after 9/11. “My father was an example of someone who cares for people,” Agoglia says, adding that the two were very close.

At the age of 30, he began searching for something to make his life more meaningful. He started thinking about the devastation he had seen when his company was hired to clean up a few months after a natural disaster. “I began to do some research and realized 86 percent of the fire departments in the U.S. are volunteer-driven and they only have equipment for house fires and car accidents,” he says. “So I thought ‘Who does the community go to when a disaster happens?’”

Instead of getting paid to help these communities, he wanted to do the same work for free. So in May 2007, after learning that an EF5 tornado had hit Greensburg, Kan., he left his home base in Pennsylvania and headed west with his crane-equipped tractor trailer to clear roads for firefighters and ambulances that needed to get into the area. That trip changed Agoglia’s life forever.