Rescue crews are working around the clock to find a 64-year-old Pennsylvania woman authorities believe fell into a sinkhole as unstable ground and concerns for worker safety complicate the rescue mission.
Elizabeth Pollard of Unity Township was looking for her cat, Pepper, on Monday night when Pennsylvania State Police say she fell into a 30-feet-deep sinkhole near an old coal mine. The rescue operation began Tuesday, when Pollard’s family called the police around 1 a.m. to report her missing.
“It almost feels like it opened up with her standing on top of it,” Pennsylvania State Trooper Steve Limani told reporters.
Crews were reassessing their rescue tactics on Wednesday morning as the crumbling old coal mine complicates their efforts. Crews were using water to help remove clay and dirt from the mine, but have since discovered that strategy was making conditions more dangerous.
“The integrity of that mine is starting to become compromised,” Limani said, explaining that crews will have to “switch gears” and execute a more complicated dig.
Police found the grandmother’s car at a restaurant near the sinkhole in Marguerite, Pennsylvania, with her five-year-old granddaughter inside around 3 a.m. Tuesday.
The child “nodded off in the car and woke up,” Limani said. “Grandma never came back.”
Pollard’s son Axel Hayes told CBS News he hopes his mother is safe and alive.
“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 [if] she went somewhere and found somewhere safer,” Hayes told the outlet.
“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,” he continued.
Restaurant workers didn’t see any manhole-sized opening Pollard may have fallen into in the hours before her disappearance, leading police to believe the sinkhole is brand-new.
It appears the sinkhole was “most likely created during the time, unfortunately, that Mrs. Pollard was walking around," Limani said. "We don’t see any evidence of any time where that hole would have been there prior to [her decision] to walk around and look for her cat."
Officials have declared a state of emergency in the area, according to Unity Township supervisor Mike O’Barto.
"What this does is this gives the township as well as energency services the chance to get any bit of equipment that we may need without having to deal with a bidding process,” O’Barto said. So it’s very important that we did this today, and we’re here to do whatever it takes in this rescue mission.”
In addition to utiizing search and rescue teams, authorities have also used a vacuum truck to suck debris out of the sinkhole. Crews dedicated much of Tuesday to widening the hole and getting rescuers into the mine area.
Crews have put cameras and microphones into the hole in a bid to locate Pollard. They have found what appears to be a shoe, police said, but they have not seen or heard from her.
Oxygen levels have been “perfect” in the hole, according to authorities, who have not identified any carbon monoxide or explosive gases.
“The atmosphere has been perfect at this point so we still have some hope that there’s a void and we’ll be able to get there with an excavation company," Pleasant Unity Volunteer Fire Department Chief John Bacha told reporters.
Police are “pretty confident” they’re searching for Pollard in the right place, Pleasant Valley Fire Chief John Bacha told local outlet Triblive.
