Sinkhole search for grandmother now a recovery mission as crews say they’ve found no signs of life

The search for a Pennsylvania grandmother believed to have fallen into a sinkhole Monday while searching for her cat has transitioned from a rescue mission to a recovery effort, officials say.

“We feel like we failed. It’s tough,” Pennsylvania State Police spokesperson Trooper Steve Limani said during a news conference Wednesday evening, noting there have been no signs of life during the massive effort to find 64-year-old Elizabeth Pollard in a fragile and dangerous underground landscape.

Rescuers had been pumping water through a long-abandoned mine at the site to clear out debris, then remove it with a vacuum, to make it easier to see what is underground – a process Limani compared to trying to pull a boulder out of a house of cards.

But the compromised condition of the mine has made it too dangerous to continue that effort, Limani said Wednesday evening.

“It’s got areas of where it’s started to collapse and decay and buckle a little bit. We’re afraid that we’re going to make it worse if we try to continue to plow forward with the techniques we were using.”

Crews will now work from dawn to dusk “to dig out a massive area, more than four times the size of the area that we had originally done, to try and secure the mine so that we can access it to try and go in there and recover her,” Limani said. “It’s going to be at least another day of just solid digging.”

The shift in strategy comes after crews using cameras and sound detection equipment failed to pick up any signs that Pollard may still be alive since the search began early Tuesday. Oxygen levels inside the sinkhole have also become “lower than what you’d want for someone to try and sustain their life,” Limani noted.

For the responders, it’s now a matter of “trying to find her and do right by her family,” the trooper said.

Two abandoned mines are near the sinkhole, a federal database shows. They are designated to “pose the highest danger to citizens’ lives” due to land safety and environmental concerns, according to the National Association of Abandoned Mine Land Programs.

Sinkholes usually form due to groundwater slowly eroding the underground rock that holds soil together, and Pennsylvania is particularly prone to sinkhole damage because of its limestone bedrock, according to the US Geological Survey.

64-year-old last seen behind restaurant

Police got a phone call around 1 a.m. Tuesday from a relative of Pollard who said the grandmother, with her 5-year-old granddaughter, had left in a car to look for her cat the prior afternoon and had not been heard from since, State Police said Tuesday.

Pollard was last seen around 5 p.m. Monday in Marguerite, an unincorporated area of Unity Township, Limani said, in a part of southwestern Pennsylvania dotted with old coal mines.

Police out looking for the woman discovered her vehicle – with her granddaughter inside – parked near a restaurant.

A fresh, deep sinkhole was just steps away.

“We, at that point in time, realized that this could be a very bad situation,” Limani said.

The granddaughter, who’d been in the car for nearly 12 hours in below-freezing temperatures, was unharmed, Limani said. But the girl, now with her parents, couldn’t give police any details about what happened.

“She was just a 5-year-old girl that was waiting in the car for her grandmother to come back,” he said.

No sounds picked up by monitors in search

The sinkhole, which was about 15 to 20 feet from Pollard’s vehicle, appears to be about the size of a manhole at the surface but gets much wider below ground, making search and rescue efforts challenging, Limani said.

The sinkhole likely appeared at some point Monday, officials said.

“That hole wasn’t there earlier in the day,” Limani said. “It’s close enough to the building that somebody would have seen it.”

“There is a very thin layer of earth, and to be honest with you, it appears to be mostly just grass interwoven where she had stepped,” he said.

While no sounds have been picked up by monitoring equipment, the rescue teams spotted a shoe in the sinkhole Tuesday using a camera, Pleasant Valley Volunteer Fire Company Chief John Bacha said.

“Let’s just say it’s a modern shoe, not something you would find in a coal mine in Marguerite in 1940,” he said.

Thousands of sinkholes in Pennsylvania

The sinkhole where Pollard is believed to have fallen is in an area with limestone bedrock and had almost no ground left, state police said.

Bacha took an initial look in the hole Tuesday using a ladder and a harness but did not spot Pollard, he said. “You couldn’t even get close enough to the hole because of the way it was undermined,” he said.

“A lot of the little villages around here are old coal patch towns,” he said. “(It’s) very common to find a lot of mines in these areas, obviously a concern to have these mine subsidence issues.”

The state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP, which regulates the state’s operational and abandoned mines, is on the scene, spokesperson Lauren Camarda said.

“Once police and emergency response have cleared the scene, DEP’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation will investigate the site to determine if this issue is the result of historic mine subsidence,” she said in a Tuesday statement.

“Each year, DEP works to address historic abandoned mine land features across the Commonwealth with available federal funding and address emergencies as they arise,” Camarda added.

As of 2020, there were over 3,600 sinkholes in Pennsylvania, according to data collected by researchers at Millersville University.

“Sinkholes are dramatic because the land usually stays intact for a while until the underground spaces just get too big,” the US Geological Survey says.