Pennsylvania rescuers say ground unstable near sinkhole where grandmother went missing
Dec. 4 (UPI) -- Officials on Wednesday said a sinkhole in western Pennsylvania is now more dangerous and unstable after a missing woman reportedly fell through it while babysitting her granddaughter.
"The integrity of that mine is starting to become compromised," Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Steve Limani said early Wednesday morning during a morning news conference.
By Wednesday evening, officials indicated the mission had transitioned into a "recovery" effort with no body recovered.
Limani expressed hope earlier in the day that Elizabeth Pollard, 64, may still be alive in an air pocket after it was believed she fell in the sinkhole Monday along Marguerite Road down the way from Monday's Union Restaurant.
"There's been nothing that said she is not alive or she could not possibly have survived," he said. "There's nothing that said 100% definitively it couldn't have happened. And until that 100% happens, how could I say it's any other way?"
Pollard left home Monday in search of her cat and was last seen at 5 p.m. EST that day in the unincorporated coal town community of Marguerite in Westmoreland County located about 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
Police got a call around 1 a.m. Tuesday from a Pollard relative.
The search ultimately led to the discovery of her car at about 3 a.m. In the vehicle was Pollard's 5-year-old granddaughter, who has since been reunited with her parents. The young girl reportedly had been in the car in freezing weather for 10 hours or more after her grandmother went missing.
About 15 to 20 feet away, police found a sinkhole about the size of a large manhole. Limani said that they believe the sinkhole appeared as she was walking in the area.
A shoe was found in the hole.
"Let's just say it's a modern shoe, not something you would find in a coal mine in Marguerite in 1940," said Pleasant Valley Volunteer Fire Company Chief John Bacha.
The sinkhole where Pollard is believed to have fallen is in an area with limestone bedrock and had almost no ground left, state police confirmed.
On Wednesday, Limani said cold water that engineers have been utilizing to flush dirt out of the mine has been causing problems with the mine's integrity.
Limani said the hole -- connected to an abandoned mine -- has more than enough oxygen and is about 55 degrees warmer than above ground.
"We have to be very careful with the water issues we've been experiencing," he said.
Abandoned mines and sinkholes, while rare, are uniquely a Pennsylvania problem and have been a safety hazard for decades. Limani noted the sinkhole wasn't there before Monday. However, experts indicated the mine had been deteriorating for a long period of time.
"A lot of the little villages around here are old coal patch towns," said Bacha, adding it's "very common to find a lot of mines in these areas, obviously a concern to have these mine subsidence issues."
The once bustling Columbia County borough of Centralia is a Pennsylvania cult legend with its long-since burning coal fire underneath the now abandoned former coal town that's notably been ongoing since 1962. And state officials have for decades taken steps to keep the public away from that general area.
A federal database showed two abandoned mines near the sinkhole where Pollard went missing, which "pose the highest danger to citizens' lives" due to land safety and other environmental concerns, according to the National Association of Abandoned Mine Land Programs.
A few years ago a 30-foot sinkhole uncovered itself in Fallowfield Township in neighboring Washington County where Pollard went missing Monday.
Pennsylvania has a long and sometimes checkered history with the dying fossil fuel industry dating back to the peak of the coal era with abandoned mines at all corners of the Keystone State.
"Sinkholes are dramatic because the land usually stays intact for a while until the underground spaces just get too big," the U.S. Geological Survey said.
By the 1800s, Pennsylvania coal fueled America's industrial growth and coal was the primary fuel source for western Pennsylvania's famous steel industry, according to the state's Department of Environmental Protection.
As of 2020, there were over 3,600 sinkholes in Pennsylvania, according to data collected by Millersville University.
In 1982, an electrician and a 35-ton crane plunged into a 288-foot abandoned mine shaft more than half filled with water around the 80-foot-wide in downtown Scranton in northeastern Pennsylvania on the opposite side of the state where Pollard went missing near an abandoned mine.
It was noteworthy in that rescuers had the option to determine if any other old adjoining tunnel to the mine would give them better access to the main shaft that hadn't been used since the 1930s.
Years later in 2013, a 25- to 30-foot wide sinkhole roughly 10- to 12-feet deep forced a family in the Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania to evacuate their home after a sinkhole appeared. Five years later, a similar event took place in the same region when a 30 to 35 feet sinkhole likewise appeared in Cheltenham Township near Philadelphia.
