A recent product safety notice regarding stadium light poles has thrown the entire season’s schedule for the King’s Fork High School football teams into question.

With crews set on Wednesday to remove the four fixtures that illuminate the field, the school system has announced that this week’s varsity football game against Indian River High School will be played Thursday night at Nansemond River High School’s stadium.

It’s not exactly home turf for KFHS’s Bulldogs, but they will be the home team. At least this “home game” will be played in Suffolk. Two weeks ago, KFHS was scheduled to be at home against Hickory High School, but had to travel to the Chesapeake school for the game because of the lighting situation.

King’s Fork is one of at least two Hampton Roads schools that have been directly impacted by the CPSC’s warning.

A pole at Norview High School’s football field fell and smashed a portion of the bleachers there late this summer. No one was injured, but the school was forced to remove all of the poles that had been made by Whitco Co. as a safety measure.

When they received the CPSC warning the day after the Norview accident and realized that King’s Fork had the same brand of lighting, Suffolk officials called for a structural inspection of the lights and closed the field pending the results.

“Safety is the most important thing,” SPS spokesperson Bethanne Bradshaw said Tuesday. “You don’t want to be worried, so you err on the side of safety.”

Bradshaw said the structural engineer’s report to the school system had identified “some minor issues” that prompted the school officials to have the lights at King’s Fork removed and examined again once they’re on the ground.

The CPSC has recommended that Whitco poles be inspected for signs of cracking, fractures or deterioration to the welds that join the poles to their base plates. Any poles found with those problems, CPSC, said, should be repaired or replaced.

Bradshaw could not say what conditions caused Suffolk’s decision to remove the King’s Fork poles.

She also was unsure whether the work would be covered in any warranties issued by builder S.B. Ballard Construction Co. when the contractor turned the new school over to the School Board in 2004. Whitco is no longer in business.

It will cost the school system $3,100 to have the poles removed, she said. Until they know the extent of the problem, officials are unwilling to speculate on how much the repairs could cost or when they could be done.

“We’re going to work on the legal side to the best of our ability to make sure (the cost) doesn’t come out of our budget,” she said.

In the meantime, administrators are trying to decide what to do about the remainder of King’s Fork’s home games this season.

“I guess the option of Saturday (daytime) games is on the table,” Bradshaw said, though she noted that players have indicated a preference for finding a way to keep the games on Friday nights.

A Parks and Recreation Department outdoor complex at John F. Kennedy Middle School also was found to have Whitco lighting, and that field was closed by the city, pending inspections and tests.

City spokesperson Debbie George said Tuesday that a structural engineer had found no problems with any of the facility’s 12 Whitco poles during his inspection. A design evaluation is due next week, and then officials will decide whether or not to re-open the fields.