The desperate search for a missing grandmother believed to have fallen down a sinkhole while looking for her cat has now become a recovery mission, according to officials.
Elizabeth Pollard, 64, of Unity Township was looking for her cat, Pepper, on Monday night she fell into a 30-feet-deep sinkhole near an old coal mine in Marguerite, said Pennsylvania State Police.
Pollard’s family called police at around 1 a.m. on Tuesday morning to report her missing.
The grandmother’s car was then found at a restaurant near the sinkhole at around 3 a.m., with her five-year-old granddaughter inside, Pennsylvania State Police spokesperson Trooper Steve Limani said on Wednesday.
The child had “nodded off in the car and woke up,” Limani said. But “Grandma never came back.”
A desperate rescue operation was quickly launched to try to find the 64-year-old.
But now, more than two days on from her disappearance, Limani said it the search is no longer a rescue mission, but a recovery effort.
Limani said there were no signs of life of the 64-year-old and that oxygen levels in the underground crater had significantly plummeted.
“We feel like we failed. It’s tough”, he told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday night, reported CNN.
Crews had been forced to reassess their rescue tactics on Wednesday morning due to the crumbling and decayed debris in the sinkhole.
Search teams had been using water to remove clay and dirt from the mine, but found this was making conditions more dangerous.
“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,” Limani said.
Now, search and rescue teams plan to excavate an even larger radius, four times the size of the original area already dug up, in a final desperate bid to recover her body, Limani said.
He estimated this would take at least one more day of “solid digging.”
It is now a matter of “trying to find her and do right by her family,” he said.
On Tuesday, Pollard’s son Axel Hayes told CBS the family had been clinging to hope that she would be found safe.
“Right now, I’m going through a lot of mixed 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 whether she went somewhere safer,” he said.
“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 I can talk to”, he continued.
