The elaborate display includes skeletons operating backhoes and a local tram falling into an enormous hole. A skull and crossbones on an orange road sign warns: “Road workers dead ahead.”

It’s meant to poke fun at the 2.3-mile-long, $13.5 million road work project that’s famously disrupted the main stretch of Ogunquit, a town in York County, Maine. It appears just a few feet from the real orange cones around the town’s Route 1 that’s been undergoing repairs since March.

Construction workers on the job said they take no offense from the ghoulish display, though the local television station did receive an email from one person to say it was in poor taste and offensive to state Department of Transportation (DOT) workers.

“I think it’s perfectly fine,” said Mike Gowen, a labourer on the job site, as his colleagues nodded. “I thought it was pretty funny.”

A sign next to a zombie decked out in an orange safety vest and a bright yellow hardhat says the site is “DOT (Disrupt Ogunquit Traffic) Project # 019106.”

Nearby resident Jana Whitten told the Portland Press Herald that the road construction is a well-known headache in the area, enough so that she avoided coming into Ogunquit over the summer.

As she spoke, a large construction truck drove by, its driver honking the horn a few times and waving.

The town’s two-year-long road project is inescapable, with large sections of road roped off with tape and lined with orange cones. Gravel-pocked dirt walkways line the road. In addition to redoing the road itself, the project includes two new bridges, sewer-line upgrades, rebuilt sidewalks and adding new lighting and landscaping.

Just this month, the Ogunquit town manager told the Select Board that these would be “the toughest few months” of the project and that many businesses have incurred “a significant loss of revenue” because of it.

State officials said they expect to finish by December 2016.

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