NEW YORK – Forensic anthropologists on Thursday recovered 39 bones found in a road being dug up at the World Trade Center site in the three-month-old renewed search for remains of Sept. 11 victims.
The recovery — made in a Brooklyn facility where anthropologists are hand-searching debris — was the largest in a day since Oct. 19, when utility workers came across about 80 bones in a long-abandoned manhole.
City officials are digging up the road, which had carried construction trucks in and out of the site since it was rebuilt in the spring of 2002. They also plan to search the land where a destroyed church sat, as well as hundreds of manholes surrounding the site, for remains that could be underground.
The original nine-month cleanup yielded more than 20,000 pieces of remains of the nearly 3,000 victims of the terrorist attack. Since September 2005, more than 1,000 more have been found in a vacant skyscraper across from the site and in the service road on the western edge. None has been matched with any victims.
The latest findings are coming from the fill that made up the road, where city officials also have reported finding computer parts, electrical wires and steel that appear to be trade center debris. Officials involved in the initial cleanup have said pieces of steel could have pierced the ground when they fell off the towers, creating fissures where remains or debris could get in.
The city plans to spend $30 million on the latest search, which is expected to take a year.
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