Street in mid-January, Corporation Secretary Mr. Roger Sherratt said yesterday.

The work will not cause much traffic disruption, but about another two dozen parking spaces in the city core will be lost for three weeks, Mr. Sherratt told The Royal Gazette .

Repairs were budgeted for after an inspection of city sewers with a tiny camera showed faults in one of the two lines that run along Front Street, he said.

The urgency was underlined when a small section of the 40-year-old sewer line caved in about two weeks ago. The section, off Front Street near Number 6 Shed, is being repaired separately, he said. Flow has been shifted to to the other sewer line, which is about 80 years old, and service to ratepayers has not been affected, he said.

To repair the stretch of the newer line from the Birdcage to Parliament Street, an overseas firm will insert a plastic sleeve that bonds to the existing line and forms a pipe within a pipe, Mr. Sherratt said.

The method uses the latest technology and the work must be done mostly at night because the sleeve material is light-sensitive. "Normally, we would have to dig up the road, dig up the piping, and replace it,'' Mr. Sherratt said. "That would take a lot of time and create a lot of traffic problems.'' One drawback is that the light-sensitive material must be stored inside Number One Shed, meaning that about half of the 50 parking spaces in the shed will be lost from about January 16 until the work is completed about three weeks later.

Fortunately, "it's a fairly quiet time for parking from the point of view of shopping,'' Mr. Sherratt said.

Parking is already severely strained in Hamilton as construction of the new multi-storey carpark at Bull's Head has resulted in the temporary loss of about 200 parking spaces there.

Mr. Sherratt said the Corporation hopes to open a temporary carpark shortly that will have spaces for about 70 cars.

The video equipment used to inspect the sewers cost the Corporation about $50,000. Aside from the problem on Front Street, "we're really quite pleased,'' Mr. Sherratt said. "The sewer system is really in quite good condition.

"There are one or two areas that we'll have to keep an eye on.''