LEWISTON – A natural gas line replacement project is on schedule, as crews hope to wrap up work in Lewiston and move into Auburn next spring.

Perry Robichaud, Northern Utilities’ project manager, said work in both cities is on track to be finished in the fall of 2008. Crews should finish most of the work in Lewiston in the next eight weeks, leaving a handful of downtown streets.

The focus changes to Auburn next year, where crews will have to replace about 29 miles of natural gas pipe over the next two summers.

“Of course, anything could happen,” Robichaud said. “But that’s the schedule. We’ve had four years to get it all done, and we can do it.”

The company is being required to replace all cast-iron gas mains in Lewiston and Auburn as part of a settlement with the state Public Utilities Commission. That came after a January 2004 explosion on Main Street in Lewiston that was blamed on a leaking Northern Utilities gas line. The explosion leveled the old Hotel Holly and the Lewiston Radiator Works and injured five people.

The project in Lewiston involved digging at 1,700 sites across the city and replacing 28 miles of gas pipe, and Auburn is in for similar work. When the work is finished, crews will have replaced almost 57 miles of gas mains in both cities.

Northern Utilities crews will finish work on several streets downtown and around Bates College in the next eight weeks. In Lewiston, only the Little Canada area between Lincoln Street and the Androscoggin River won’t be replaced this year. Crews will move to Auburn in April 2007, replacing gas mains there for the next two summers. They’ll come back and replace lines in Little Canada and New Auburn at the very end, in 2008.

Northern Utilities did some work in Auburn this summer in the downtown core streets – including Spring, Elm, High, Laurel and Academy streets. Robichaud said his work will concentrate on the northern part of Auburn next spring, starting downtown and working north along Center Street.

“But we won’t know until we begin doing some planning with the city” that won’t happen until January or February, Robichaud said.