2 weeks Ago
The body of a Pennsylvania woman believed to have fallen into a fresh sinkhole this week while searching for her cat has been found in a long-abandoned mine that the sinkhole exposed, state police said Friday. Elizabeth Pollard, 64, was found dead Friday in the mine in the southwestern Pennsylvania community of Marguerite shortly after 11:15 a.m.
, Pennsylvania State Police spokesperson Trooper Steve Limani said. Crews still were working to recover her body early Friday afternoon, he said. Pollard’s family has been notified, Limani said.
“The family ...
kept telling us, ‘We really want to have the body back so we can lay her to rest,” Limani said. “As a group, we just really wanted to make sure that we were able to do that.” Pollard’s body was found “not far away from where we believe that she’d been when she fell through the sinkhole,” Limani said.
“It was just a matter of the work to remove all the dirt.” Officials are expected to hold a news conference about the situation Friday afternoon, Limani said. The discovery ends a dayslong search that started early Tuesday when, according to state police , a relative told authorities that Pollard and her 5-year-old granddaughter had left in a car to look for her cat Monday afternoon and had not been heard from since.
Police who were looking for the woman then discovered her vehicle early Tuesday – with her granddaughter unharmed inside after being there nearly 12 hours – parked near a restaurant. A fresh, deep sinkhole was just steps away. That spurred a rescue mission, part of which involved workers pumping water through a long-abandoned mine at the site to clear out debris, then removing it with a vacuum to make it easier to see what was underground.
But by Wednesday evening, state police said they no longer expected to find her alive, saying cameras and sound detection equipment failed to pick up signs of life, and that the compromised conditions of the mine made it too dangerous for rescuers to continue with the techniques they’d been using. The sinkhole where Pollard was believed to have fallen is in an area with limestone bedrock and had almost no ground left, state police said. The sinkhole likely appeared at some point Monday, officials said.
Two abandoned mines are near the sinkhole, a federal database shows. They are designated as posing “highest danger to citizens’ lives” due to land safety and environmental concerns, according to the National Association of Abandoned Mine Land Programs. This is a developing story and will be updated.
CNN’s Lex Harvey and Andy Rose contributed to this report..
