NEW YORK (AP) – Forensic anthropologists on Thursday recovered 39 bones found in a road being dug up at ground zero in the 3-month-old search for still-buried human 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 at the site.

City officials are digging up the road, which had carried construction trucks in and out of the lower Manhattan site since it was rebuilt in the spring of 2002, and plan to search the land where a destroyed church sat and hundreds of manholes surrounding the site for human remains that could be underground.

The original nine-month cleanup of the destroyed twin towers yielded more than 20,000 human remains of the nearly 3,000 victims of the terrorist attack. Since September 2005, over 1,000 more have been found on a vacant skyscraper across from the site and in the service road on the western edge of the site. None has been identified.

The latest findings are coming from the landfill that made up the road, where city officials also have reported finding computer parts, electrical wires and steel that appears to be trade center debris. Officials involved in the initial cleanup of the 16-acre site have said that 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.