A grandmother looking for her lost cat fell into a pit that had just opened up above an abandoned coal mine in western Pennsylvania on Tuesday night. Rescuers worked all night to try to find her.
Video from the scene showed that workers worked both above and below ground while bright lights lit up snowflakes and different pieces of equipment at the scene.
On Tuesday morning, workers put a pole camera with a sensitive hearing device into the hole in Marguerite. However, the camera did not pick up any sound. Trooper Steve Limani, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Police, said that a camera dropped into the hole showed what looked like a shoe about 30 feet (9 meters) below the surface.
Linani said, “It feels like it opened up with her standing on top of it.”
Around 1 a.m. Tuesday, Elizabeth Pollard’s family called the police to say she hadn’t been seen since she went outside Monday night to look for her cat Pepper.
Marguerite is about 40 miles (65 kilometers) east of Pittsburgh. That’s where police said they found Pollard’s car parked near Monday’s Union Restaurant. Pollard’s granddaughter, who is 5, was found safe in the car.
Hunters and restaurant workers who were in the area in the hours before Pollard went missing hadn’t seen the manhole-sized hole, which led searchers to think the sinkhole was new.
In the area, where it got below freezing overnight, the government used a backhoe to dig.
“We’re pretty sure we’re in the right spot.” “We hope there is still a hole she could be in,” John Bacha, chief of the Pleasant Valley Volunteer Fire Company, told Triblive.
Late in the afternoon, searchers were using a mine to try to find her. They had also dug a different entrance because they were worried that the ground around the sinkhole opening might not be stable. The police said they would keep looking for Pollard until they found her.
Linani said Pollard lives in a small area across the street from where her car and granddaughter were found.
The girl “fell asleep in the car and woke up.” He said, “Grandma never came back.” The kid stayed in the car until two cops came and got her. Pepper’s whereabouts are unknown.
The police said that sinkholes are frequent in the area because of subsidence caused by coal mining.
When the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection arrived at the scene, they decided that the hole in the ground was probably caused by work in the Marguerite Mine, which was last used by the H.C. Frick Coke Company in 1952. In that spot, the Pittsburgh coal seam is about 20 feet (6 meters) below the ground.
According to Neil Shader, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection, the state’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation will look at the scene after the search is over to see if the opening was really caused by mine subsidence.
