By CATHY DYSON

Clarence “Moose” Dobson isn’t surprised when the electricity goes out during stormy weather.

He doesn’t expect outages on crystal-clear days when there’s not a whisper of wind.

But, as the retired sheriff told the King George County Board of Supervisors recently, that’s happened more times than he and his wife, Edna, can remember in the last eight years or so.

Dobson was so annoyed by being powerless in good weather that he asked the supervisors to contact Dominion Power on his behalf.

They did, and so did The Free Lance-Star. Dominion said this week that it’s working to “develop a plan of action to strengthen reliability for Mr. Dobson,” according to Dominion spokeswoman Daisy Pridgen.

The outages have aggrieved a man who doesn’t fluster easily. Seven years ago, when a wood splitter malfunctioned and cut off his hand, Dobson calmly told others to put the severed part on ice.

“I understand the process, and I know it takes time,” Dobson said about the outages. “What I can’t understand is why they can’t figure out what the problem is and fix it.”

Dobson and his wife, Edna, live in a two-story brick home that he built 26 years ago. Dobson was a master electrician before he got into security work and became King George sheriff in 1976.

Their home is one of three on the same transmission line in Sealston, near the King George Landfill and Birchwood Power Facility.

Edna Dobson jokes that if she had a long enough extension cord, she could plug into the power plant.

Also on the same line are a rental house and the home of Moose Dobson’s 88-year-old mother, Nannie.

Over the years when the lights went out, Dobson checked the line, which runs through an open field, for fallen limbs or other visible problems. When the power crew showed up, he watched and asked questions.

If the outage was limited to his transmission line, he noticed a problem on the power pole his line connects with, at the intersection of State Route 3 and Birchwood Creek Road.

A fuse would have blown on the transformer, causing the arm on the mechanism to drop. Repairmen would reset the fuse and reconnect the arm, and power would be restored.