A grandmother looking for her lost cat apparently fell into a sinkhole that had recently opened above an abandoned western Pennsylvania coal mine and rescuers worked late into the night to try and find her.
Bright lights illuminated snow flurries and various equipment at the site in Marguerite, about 65 kilometres east of Pittsburgh as crews worked above and below ground, video from the scene showed.
A state police spokesperson said early Wednesday they were reassessing their tactics to avoid putting themselves at risk in the search for Elizabeth Pollard, 64.
“The integrity of that mine is starting to become compromised,” Trooper Steve Limani told reporters.
Rescuers had been using water to break down clay and dirt to remove it from the mine, but that action was making conditions dangerous “for potential other mine subsidence to take place,” he said.
“We’re probably going to have to switch gears” to a more complicated dig, he said.
In an interview with CBS News, Pollard’s son, Axel Hayes, said he is experiencing a mix of emotions.
“I’m upset that she hasn’t been found yet, and I’m really just worried about whether she’s still down there, where she is down there, or she went somewhere and found somewhere safer,” Hayes said. “Right now, I just hope she’s alive and well, that she’s going to make it, that my niece still has a grandmother, that I still have a mother that I can talk to.”
Went missing Monday evening
Pollard’s family called police at about 1 a.m. Tuesday to say she had not been seen since going out Monday evening to search for Pepper, her cat.
Crews on Tuesday morning lowered a pole camera with a sensitive listening device into the hole, located near Monday’s Union Restaurant, but nothing was heard. A camera lowered into the hole showed what could be a shoe about nine metres below the surface.
“It almost feels like it opened up with her standing on top of it,” Limani said.
Police said they found Pollard’s car parked near the restaurant. Her five-year-old granddaughter was found safe inside the car.
The manhole-sized opening had not been seen by hunters and restaurant workers who were in the area in the hours before Pollard’s disappearance, leading rescuers to speculate the sinkhole was new.
Authorities used an excavator to dig in the area, where temperatures dropped to below freezing overnight.
“We are pretty confident we are in the right place. We’re hoping there is still a void she could be in,” Pleasant Valley Volunteer Fire Company Chief John Bacha told Triblive.
By late afternoon, searchers were using access to a mine to try to find Pollard and had dug a separate entrance out of concern that the ground around the sinkhole opening was not stable. Authorities vowed to keep searching for Pollard until she is found.
Pollard lives in a small neighborhood across the street from where her car and granddaughter were located, Limani said.
The young girl “nodded off in the car and woke up. Grandma never came back,” Limani said. The child stayed in the car until two troopers found her. It’s not clear what happened to Pepper.
A sinkhole is an area of ground that has no natural external surface drainage and can form when the ground below the land surface can no longer support the land above, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The land usually stays intact for a period of time until the underground spaces just get too big. If there is not enough support for the land above the spaces, then a sudden, dramatic collapse of the land surface can happen.
Decades-old mine nearby
Police said sinkholes are not uncommon because of subsidence from coal mining activity in the area.
A team from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, which responded to the scene, concluded the underground void is likely the result of work in the Marguerite Mine, last operated by the H.C. Frick Coke Company in 1952. The Pittsburgh coal seam is about six metres below the surface in that area.
Department of Environmental Protection spokesperson Neil Shader said the state’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation will examine the scene after the search is over to see if the sinkhole was indeed caused by mine subsidence.
In June, a giant sinkhole in southern Illinois swallowed the centre of a soccer field built on top of a limestone mine, taking down a large light pole and leaving a gaping chasm where squads of kids often play. No one was hurt.
In 2023, a sinkhole that in 2013 fatally swallowed a man sleeping in his house in suburban Tampa, Fla., reopened for a third time, but it was behind fencing and caused no harm to people or property.