About Wildfire Pros
Wildfire Pros is a forestry and wildfire consulting firm built by people who have run the chainsaw, held the drip torch, and stood in front of a judge.
A century of combined experience, on the ground
Wildfire Pros brings together four working foresters and fire professionals who have spent their careers on the ground, not in a seminar room. Between us, we carry more than a century of combined experience in federal and private forestry, wildland fire operations, forest policy, and post-fire investigation. Since 2007, our team has delivered authoritative analysis and strategic solutions in wildfire investigation and litigation support for over 3,000 clients representing more than a billion dollars in claims.
We built this firm because landowners, businesses, law firms, and government agencies dealing with wildfire damage need something the standard consulting world rarely offers: expertise that has actually been tested in the field and in the courtroom. Our principals are registered professional foresters and career fire practitioners who have managed forests, run incident command teams, briefed Congress on forest policy, and testified as expert witnesses in complex wildfire litigation. We combine that field-tested judgment with rigorous documentation and defensible analysis, because in wildfire investigation and recovery, credibility is the only currency that matters.
Our work spans forest management and wildfire prevention planning, forest stewardship plans, ecosystem services and rehabilitation, damage assessment and recovery, wildfire claims support, forensic investigation and expert testimony, Wildfire Impact Assessment reporting, and true economic cost assessment and valuation. Whether you are a private landowner rebuilding after a catastrophic fire, a law firm building a case, or an agency assessing forest health, Wildfire Pros brings decades of hard-won, field-verified expertise to every engagement.
The people who will actually be on your matter.
Franklin Otis Carroll
Over forty years in wildfire suppression, forest management, fuels mitigation, and wildfire forensics — with the U.S. Forest Service and in private practice. Frank holds a Master of Public Administration in Natural Resources and Environmental Policy from Boise State University (1992) and a Bachelor's degree from the University of New Mexico (1975). He has served as an expert witness in wildfire proceedings in the United States and internationally, including depositions and trial testimony. He is the expert who testifies, the forester who signs the report, and the one who decides what this firm is willing to say.
Full biography
Frank Carroll's career divides cleanly in two, and the second half only works because of the first. He spent decades inside the United States Forest Service, working across fire, fuels, and natural resource management, and rising into senior roles where the questions stop being tactical and start being about authority, policy, and intent. That is the vantage point most wildfire consultants never occupy. It is one thing to read a Wildland Fire Decision Support System document; it is another to have written the kind of document that records why a line officer chose one strategy over another, and to know what the alternatives on the table actually were.
He earned a Bachelor's degree from the University of New Mexico in 1975 and a Master of Public Administration in Natural Resources and Environmental Policy from Boise State University in 1992, with additional graduate study in fire science and fire ecology. The policy training matters as much as the fire training: a great deal of modern wildfire litigation turns not on flame lengths but on what an agency was permitted to do, which framework governed the decision, and whether the obligations in a cooperative agreement were met.
Since founding Professional Forest Management, Frank has led wildfire impact analyses across the West — including the Hoback Ranches Service Improvement District analysis of the 2018 Roosevelt Fire in Wyoming and the Camp Okizu analysis of the 2020 North Complex in California — and has provided expert declarations, consultation, and testimony in federal and state proceedings for both plaintiffs and defendants. He has worked with Congressional delegations on forest policy and writes regularly on wildfire and forest management.
At PFMc he sets the evidentiary standard the firm works to: every factual claim traceable to a source a third party can check, and every place where professional judgment takes over from the record labeled as such, on the page, before opposing counsel finds it.
Credentials: MPA, Natural Resources & Environmental Policy, Boise State University (1992) · BA, University of New Mexico (1975) · Graduate study in fire science and fire ecology · Member, South Dakota Register of Private Professional Foresters · Expert witness, U.S. and international proceedings.
Joe Reddan, RPF
Operational depth paired with policy fluency. Joe has served on Type 1 Incident Management Teams across the Western states and has worked with Congressional delegations on forest policy. As a California RPF he anchors our complex fire claims and post-fire recovery work in the state where the stakes and the scrutiny are highest, and he is co-author with Frank Carroll of The Statutory Void.
Full biography
Joe Reddan came up through incident management, which is a different education than a classroom provides. Type 1 Incident Management Teams handle the largest and most complex incidents in the national system, and service on one means having been accountable for strategy, resources, and safety at a scale where every decision is documented and every document is later read by someone looking for fault. That experience is directly transferable to evaluating how another team performed, because he knows what the record should contain and what its absence implies.
As a California Registered Professional Forester — a license with statutory standing in the state with the nation's most active fire environment and most scrutinized fire litigation — Joe leads our California work: post-fire assessment, recovery prescriptions, and the technical analysis underpinning claims and expert testimony. He is President of Flexilis Forestry and served as a co-author on PFMc's Camp Okizu wildfire impact analysis of the 2020 North Complex.
With Frank Carroll he co-authored The Statutory Void: Federal Wildfire Use, Agency Discretion, and the Limits of Compensation for Affected Landowners, the policy paper that maps the gap landowners fall into when a federally managed fire crosses onto private ground.
Credentials: California Registered Professional Forester · Type 1 Incident Management Team service · President, Flexilis Forestry · Congressional forest policy engagement · Co-author, The Statutory Void.
Derrick Holdstock
Derrick brings the operational half of the promise this firm makes: the crews, the equipment, and the incident-qualified people who turn a written prescription into treated ground. Operating out of Canadian, Texas, Western Fire Resources works the southern plains and the wider West, where wind-driven grass and mixed-fuel fires move faster than almost anything in the timber country most fire experience is built on.
Full biography
A plan nobody executes is an expensive opinion. Derrick Holdstock is why PFMc does not have that problem. As President of Western Fire Resources, based in Canadian, Texas, he leads the wildland fire operations side of our work — supplying crews, equipment, and qualified personnel for fuels reduction, thinning, prescribed fire support, and post-fire stabilization, and standing up the workforce that carries a stewardship or mitigation plan from paper to completed acres.
His base of operations matters to the expertise. The Texas Panhandle produces fire behavior that timber-country practitioners often underestimate: fast, wind-driven, fuel-continuous, and capable of covering ground in hours that a forest fire would need days to cross. Working that environment builds a hard-edged practical sense of what a fuel break will actually do, how quickly conditions change, and what a crew can and cannot accomplish safely — judgment that sharpens both our prevention prescriptions and our assessment of how a suppression effort really performed.
For landowners, Derrick is the reason "we'll take care of it" is a commitment rather than a referral. For counsel, he supplies the operational reality check that keeps our analysis grounded in what crews and equipment can genuinely do on the ground.
Credentials: President, Western Fire Resources, Canadian, Texas · [Incident qualifications — to be supplied] · [Years of experience — to be supplied] · [Certifications, licenses, and notable incidents — to be supplied]
Hamp McRae
A recognized authority on tropical and subtropical forest ecosystems, with pioneering work on post-fire palm species assessment and recovery. His protocols for evaluating fire effects on palm populations are used across California, Florida, and other palm-endemic regions by public and private clients alike.
Full biography
Palms are not trees, and treating them as though they were is how post-fire assessments go wrong in the places palms dominate. A palm has no cambium to scorch in the way a conifer does, no annual rings to read, and a growing point whose survival or death is not obvious from the outside for months. A stand that looks destroyed may largely recover; a stand that looks survivable may already be lost. Getting that judgment wrong in either direction distorts a damage estimate badly.
Hamp McRae built his practice on exactly that problem. His work in California and Florida established assessment and mitigation protocols for evaluating fire effects on palm populations that are now used across the major palm-endemic regions of the United States by both public agencies and private clients — protocols for determining survivability, sequencing recovery, and quantifying loss where conventional forestry metrics simply do not apply.
For PFMc he covers tropical and subtropical ecosystems: post-fire species assessment, recovery strategy, and the specialized valuation questions that follow when the damaged resource is ornamental, agricultural, or ecological rather than merchantable timber.
Credentials: Tropical and subtropical forest ecosystem specialist · Post-fire palm species assessment and recovery protocols · Public and private sector practice across palm-endemic regions of the United States · [Degrees and certifications — to be supplied]
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Frank Carroll, Chief Forester, Wildfire Pros