BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn. — West Ridge High School canceled classes Wednesday when a broken water line on campus left the building without dependable service, Sullivan County Schools said, while the rest of the district kept its normal schedule.
District leaders tied the decision to a failed water line serving only the West Ridge grounds rather than a wider outage. A morning notice from the school system said the high school would not hold classes on Oct. 14 because of the water problem, and separate reporting described the failure as a water main break that prompted the early call to send students home.
West Ridge sits at 380 Lynn Road, close to Interstate 81 Exit 63, and enrolls about 1,600 students. The location puts the campus minutes from Bristol and other Tri-Cities communities that feed into Sullivan County Schools, so families across the Bristol side of the county scrambled for midday plans once the notice went out.
Sullivan County Schools Director Chuck Carter said Wednesday evening the district planned to reopen West Ridge on Thursday. He told reporters the break was limited to the high school grounds and that maintenance crews could not pin down what caused the line to fail, even though water problems have cropped up on that campus before.
By late Wednesday, Carter said conditions looked stable enough to resume classes the next morning, writing that systems were holding and the school was set for Thursday. That timetable meant students and staff aimed to return Oct. 15 under a regular schedule if the temporary fix kept water flowing.
Elementary, middle and other high schools in Sullivan County did not shut down. The contrast showed how a single utility failure at one large campus can idle a full day of instruction without stopping the rest of the district.
Parents watching for updates overnight had a clear takeaway from district messages: Wednesday was a one-day closure tied to campus plumbing, not a countywide weather or safety shutdown, and Thursday was the target for getting Wolves back in classrooms.
