About Wildfire Pros

Frank Carroll is Chief Forester and Wildfire Expert Consultant at Wildfire Pros, and the firm's founding voice on forest policy and wildfire litigation support. He spent four decades in wildfire management and natural resource protection, including service as a senior official with the U.S. Forest Service, where he served in multiple capacities, from Hotshot squad boss to Strategic Planner and Public Affairs Officer at Black Hills National Forest from 2003 to 2012. That career gave him a firsthand view of how federal fire and forest policy actually gets made, and how often it drifts from the agency's founding mission of caring for the land and serving the people who depend on it.

Since 2012, Frank has led Wildfire Pros' work delivering authoritative analysis, forest management expertise, and expert witness testimony for complex wildfire investigations and litigation across North America, representing more than 3,000 clients and over a billion dollars in claims. He holds a Master of Public Administration in Natural Resources and Environmental Policy from Boise State University and completed advanced graduate studies in Fire Science and Fire Ecology at the University of Idaho. He also serves as Vice President of the National Wildfire Alliance. Frank writes and speaks widely on forest policy, fire science, and the case for returning America's public forests to active, working management, and he brings that same direct, evidence-based approach to every case Wildfire Pros takes on.

Joe Reddan is Chief Forester and Wildfire Expert Consultant at Flexilis Forestry, and one of the most credentialed working foresters on the Wildfire Pros team. He carries 46 years of professional forest management experience across the federal and private sectors, beginning his career with the USDA Forest Service in South Fork, Colorado, and retiring after more than four decades of federal service. In 2017, he founded Flexilis Forestry LLC in Durango, Colorado, to bring that experience directly to family forest landowners across southwest Colorado and northern New Mexico.

Joe is a California Registered Professional Forester (RPF #3187), a 42-year member of the Society of American Foresters, and was named an SAF Fellow in 2020, one of the profession's highest honors. He is also a member of the Association of Consulting Foresters. Beyond his private consulting work, Joe has served on Type 1 Incident Management Teams across the Western United States and has worked directly with Congressional delegations on forest policy matters. That combination of operational command experience and high-level policy engagement gives him rare authority on complex fire claims and post-fire recovery operations, and he applies it to every Wildfire Pros case involving fire causation, forest damage, and recovery planning.

Derrick Holdstock is President and Wildfire Expert Consultant at Western Fire Resources, and the operational backbone of the Wildfire Pros team. He began his career in 2001 as a wildlife biologist managing habitat with prescribed fire, then moved into full-time wildland fire work with Texas Parks and Wildlife, eventually serving as West Texas Regional Fire Coordinator for the agency's Wildlife Division, a role covering roughly a third of the state. Along the way, he served multiple details with the U.S. Forest Service on hand crews and engines and was a founding member of the Adobe Walls Fire Module at the Borger Fire Department.

In 2018, Derrick founded Western Fire Resources to build a fire contracting company run the way he believed one should be: employee-centered, safety-first, and staffed by people who show up season after season. Today he owns and captains the company's lead engine, and holds qualifications as a Type 5 Incident Commander, Type 3 Prescribed Fire Burn Boss, Firing Boss, Engine Boss, and Type 3 Faller. With 25 years of federal, state, local, and private firefighting experience, Derrick brings a frontline, tactical understanding of fire behavior and suppression operations to every Wildfire Pros engagement, grounding the firm's investigative and expert witness work in what actually happens on the fireline.

Hamp McRae is Wildfire Pros' Wildfire Expert Consultant and Tropical Forestry Expert Consultant, and a recognized authority on tropical and subtropical forest ecosystems, a specialty most wildfire consulting firms simply do not cover. His work focuses on post-fire palm species assessment and recovery strategies, an area of forestry that requires an entirely different technical framework than the conifer-dominated forests most fire experts are trained in.

Hamp's pioneering work in California and Florida has established industry-leading protocols for evaluating and mitigating fire effects on palm populations, protocols now used by both public agencies and private clients across the major palm-endemic regions of the United States. When a fire moves through a landscape with significant tropical or subtropical vegetation, Hamp provides Wildfire Pros clients with assessment and recovery expertise that general forestry consultants cannot match, filling a critical gap for landowners, municipalities, and agencies managing palm and tropical forest resources after wildfire.