Newsday

Bloomberg's comments came several hours before former officials were quoted as saying they had warned the city in 2002 that recovery efforts should continue because of the possibility of finding more remains.

Yesterday morning, Bloomberg said firefighters, police officers and other city workers performed superbly under difficult conditions, but said he was uncertain why remains are being uncovered nearly five years later inside several underground crevices on the edges of the site.

"This was a massive clean-up done - a heroic job, I think is a fair way to phrase it - by people who really dedicated themselves," he said. "Firefighters who had lost sons and brothers, construction workers who worked in difficult conditions where they had lots of heavy machinery and there was a lot of pressure to do things quickly, and I think on balance, they did a magnificent job."

In fact, some officials argued in 2002 that the city was trying to end the process too quickly, according to an Associated Press story yesterday.

Retired Lt. John McArdle, the police department commander at Ground Zero, said he and others urged the city not to close the recovery process because the chance of finding more human remains existed.

"I knew that this was going to happen - they really just wanted us out of there. There was not a good exit strategy for some of these places, and if there was, it was poorly done," McArdle said.

According to McArdle and another official quoted by the AP, FDNY rescue workers were among those who resisted the Department of Design and Construction, but Fire Department spokesman Frank Gribbon said yesterday that reports of objections were exaggerated.

Chief of Department Sal Cassano said in a statement that the FDNY "had final sign-off on areas where the recovery effort was deemed complete and at no time was pressured to say otherwise."

The mayor, meeting reporters for the first time since Con Edison workers found remains on Thursday at the western edge of the World Trade Center site, said the city won't suspend construction at the site because it was already thoroughly searched.

Bloomberg said the remains may have gone undiscovered until now because the manholes were not in use at the time: "They were abandoned a long time ago. And when they were covered, I just assume people said 'Oh there's nothing in there' and didn't go in."

Since Thursday, workers have recovered 114 pieces of human remains that were taken to the city's medical examiner's office for potential DNA matches to Sept. 11 victims.