David Alan Pursley began boarding up broken windows as a sideline to his nighttime repair work for a glass shop. Thirteen years ago he and wife Brenda started their own mobile auto glass repair and board-up service, servicing customers all over Los Angeles. As demand for board-ups rose after the L.A. riots and the Northridge quake, Pursley dropped the costly auto glass sideline and the business became known simply as Alan’s Board-Ups. Jennifer Smith spoke with Pursley about plying one of the trades that booms when times are bad.

“We’re a home-based business. All you need is a business line and a pager it’s a 24-hour service. I run two trucks, and we do everything on site, out of the truck. We buy our supplies from Home Depot.

“We mainly get referred to jobs by glass shops, but also by the fire department and the police. We board up to protect the properties if someone’s house catches on fire, or a closed business is being vandalized. We carry generators and such for when we’re out on fire jobs, because a lot of times you won’t have power.

“With crime as low as it is, it’s just me and my wife running the business right now. There aren’t a lot of burglaries, no earthquakes, no riots. But it’s still steady. We’re busy now because of all the rains.

“I charge about $125 to board up a single window, say 4 feet by 8 feet. You clean the mess up, take the measurements and see what kind of glass they’ll need, and then let the glass shop know. We give the glass shops a discount over the price we charge direct customers. We get our (boarding-up) materials back from the shops when they install the glass, so we can reuse them.

“We were boarding up down there on Normandy and Florence when the riots broke out. A lot of people thought we were crazy for being out there, but I thought I’d better hang out we were working all over the place for a couple of days.

“The biggest problem was getting windows boarded up before the stores got looted. You just knew when it was time to leave, and come back and hope the buildings weren’t burned down.

“After the riots, people started calling us up wanting to get a guarantee that we would come to them first if something else happened. But no one wants to pay anything until the riot breaks out, so they won’t board up in advance. If you wait until then, it’s too late.”