A school bus driver touches the brakes as she hits a bump on the soon to be reconstructed Princess St.

A major road project on Princess Street will start this week likely causing some headaches for homeowners in the area.

Joe Adams, director of operations for Petrolia, says Princess between Nelson and Dufferin Streets will be torn up for a $1.3 million project for most of the fall.

“We’re replacing the old water main with a new one and new services,” he says adding the main trunk sanitary line which runs down the middle of the street will need some repair and will need to be realigned. “We’ll get some of those problems fixed up and maybe put a liner (inside the line) sometime down the road.”

The work will not be easy. Adams says the services have likely been in the ground about 70 years and some of it is between 18 and 20 feet beneath the surface.

And he says it make some time to fix. “If it was idea construction weather it would be done by the end of November,” says Adams. But he says, knowing what the weather is like it would be “somewhat realistic” that “final restoration of all the odds and sods might be May.”

Adams says the town didn’t receive grants for the project. Instead, it put off road work last year and saved up gas tax revenues. Some of the money for the project comes directly from taxes.