Search for remains at World Trade Center site to expand as more remains found

NEW YORK (AP) The search for human remains at the World Trade Center site will be expanded, a city official said Friday, hours before searchers found what may be more bone fragments at the site.<br/>

Friday, December 29th 2006, 10:08 pm

By: News On 6

NEW YORK (AP) The search for human remains at the World Trade Center site will be expanded, a city official said Friday, hours before searchers found what may be more bone fragments at the site.

In a memo to Mayor Michael Bloomberg about the search for remains, Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler said debris believed to be from the towers had been dug up from under a service road on the site's western edge and said more of the road would be excavated.

Crews sifting through the material have reported finding computer parts, office carpet, electrical wires and steel from the building.

"Based on the appearance of what could be WTC-related debris in the trench, the majority of the haul road requires further excavation," Skyler wrote. He said officials had identified another 165 underground utility cavities in the streets around the site that need to be searched, bringing the total number to nearly 600.

Hours later, word came from the site that workers had found what appeared to be several more pieces of bone from the road excavation.

The renewed search for remains began in October after utility crews found bones in an abandoned manhole that had been paved over and forgotten along the western edge of the site.

In the hurry to finish cleaning up the site during the spring of 2002, that manhole and a number of other subterranean pockets were never searched for victims' remains.

Until Friday, the only remains turned up since the search resumed were some 200 bones in the initial manhole, plus a handful of fragments in three other manholes.

Some victims' families have pushed for a wider excavation under the service road, saying they believed crews in 2002 used rubble from the towers instead of clean soil when they were excavating the disaster site and building the road -- a charge the city denies.

"Thank God. Thank God they're finally doing this," said Tim Sumner, whose brother-in-law, firefighter Joseph Leavey, was killed in the terrorist attacks.

Some 40 percent of the 2,749 people killed in the Sept. 11 attack there still have not had any remains identified. None of the new discoveries has been matched to any of the dead.

Skyler estimated in his letter that the yearlong search effort would cost $30 million.