At a sinkhole above an abandoned Pennsylvania coal mine, hopes of a rescue dwindle

UPDATE: Police confirmed they found Elizabeth Pollard's body. Latest details here.

Three days after a Pennsylvania woman searching for her cat disappeared at the chasm of a three-story deep sinkhole, the digging crews were back at it Thursday, hoping for a miracle but expecting to recover her remains.

The scope of the effort was scaled down after authorities concluded 64-year-old Elizabeth Pollard is not likely to have survived what could have been a 30-foot (9-meter) drop into a damp, dark hole where coal mining ended seven decades ago. After overnight snowfall left a thin coating on the ground, work crews were maneuvering a bulldozer and crane to excavate more earth.

Axel Hayes, Pollard’s son, was at her house about half a mile (0.8 kilometers) from the sinkhole on Thursday with his father, Kenny Pollard, still hoping the search will produce good news while bracing for the worst.

“We’re just trying to hold hopes out,” Hayes said in a phone interview. “We’re not really sure what to feel right now.”

The hole is located next to Monday’s Union Restaurant in Marguerite, a Westmoreland County community some 40 miles (65 kilometers) east of Pittsburgh.

Pollard — who was devoted to cats, according to Hayes — drove to the restaurant around 5 p.m. Monday to search for her male cat, Pepper. Inside her black Chevy Equinox was her 5-year-old granddaughter, whom Pollard often babysat while the girl’s mother was working.

Pollard grew up in Jeanette, about 12 miles (19 kilometers) from Unity Township, where she lived for much of her adult life. She spent more than a decade working at Walmart and was known as a happy person. She and Kenny, her husband of more than four decades, had adopted a pair of infant boys, raising them in the two-story home on Dos Drive.

She loved cats, connecting with pretty much every feline she encountered. At one point she even had about 10 of her own, Hayes said. So when Pepper disappeared, she drove down the hill from her home to the parking lot at Monday’s Union Restaurant, an Italian spot. She asked a couple of hunters she encountered there if they had seen Pepper.

What happened next is uncertain, but police have speculated that she may have unwittingly walked directly onto a patch of grass that barely concealed a massive sinkhole, a yawning gap in the ground a remnant of extensive coal mining that ended in the early 1950s.

If they’re right, the only trace of Pollard that’s been detected so far may be a shoe that has twice been spotted at the bottom of the hole, fleetingly seen by crews using video cameras to look for her.

It was cold on Monday night, when temperatures dropped below freezing. Inside the Equinox, Pollard’s granddaughter waited for her to return, eventually dozing off. Investigators consider it a stroke of good fortune that the child did not leave the car and venture the 20 feet (6 meters) or so to the sinkhole.

At about 1 a.m., some eight hours after Pollard was last seen, the little girl’s mother called 911 to report them both missing, Hayes said. State police located the vehicle two hours later and soon saw the sinkhole. The hunters hadn’t noticed it, nor had the employees who were in and about the closed restaurant on Monday. With an entrance then the size of a sewer manhole cover and tufts of grass on the perimeter, authorities have surmised it is a fresh hole. Her own weight may have been what caused it to open up right beneath her, or it may have simply been hard to see in the twilight.

The 5-year-old was startled by two troopers knocking on the car window to rescue her. Police say she was unharmed.

With attention focusing on the sinkhole, a fire chief got harnessed in and anchored securely — with a ladder in case he needed to scramble to the surface — in what was a fruitless effort to peer down and look for any sign of Pollard. The situation was considered so dangerous that access to the rim of the sinkhole was tightly restricted and closely monitored.

Unity Township, the local municipal government, authorized emergency spending to bring in equipment for the dangerous underground search. State officials with expertise in abandoned mines were consulted. The team began to pump oxygen into the hole in hopes that she was alive. And they widened the hole and tried to access the spot where they believed she had fallen through the maze of old mine tunnels.

The digging became an exhausting exercise in frustration. The team tried to soften the ground with water as they worked to excavate an enormous amount of soil and rock. In some places, the mine shaft had collapsed, in other areas there was buckling. Electronic monitoring detected no sounds. The cameras found only the single shoe.

Donations of food showed up while the restaurant remained closed, temporarily converted into a makeshift police briefing site. Mud-covered and weary rescuers emerged from the dark underground, relieved by fresh replacements. Maps nearly a century old were consulted to give the team some idea of the location of passages that apparently meet just below the sinkhole opening.

The team began to talk ominously about the wooden mine supports as a house of cards.

By Wednesday, authorities figured it was unlikely that Pollard was still alive after what may have been a crushing fall into the chasm. Oxygen levels in the hole, despite their efforts to pump in fresh air, remained too low. And when the team was able to check the spot where they thought Pollard might be, they saw no sign of her.

The decision was made to change the focus from trying to rescue Pollard to attempting to retrieve her body, and risky rescue efforts that could compound the tragedy were halted. The team would no longer work through the night. The family was informed.

Hayes said he understood the decision: “I’d rather not anybody else get hurt.”

By Thursday morning, Hayes, his wife and his father were waiting at the Pollards’ home for an update. They were hoping for a miracle, for word that she had somehow survived. A long shot.

Pepper the cat has yet to show up, Hayes said. He thinks Pepper is hiding out, waiting for her to return.

“The cat was definitely attached to her,” Hayes said. “And he’s not going to leave the area until she’s found.”

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Freelance photographer Matt Freed contributed from Unity Township, Pennsylvania.