Woman falls into sinkhole looking for cat, officials believe

UNITY TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Officials in Western Pennsylvania are looking for a woman who they believe fell into a sinkhole looking for her cat.

State Police received a call early Tuesday morning from the family of Elizabeth Pollard who was worried about her whereabouts, WPXI reported. The call came in at around 1 a.m. and by 2:50 a.m. state troopers found her car behind a restaurant in Unity Township, Pennsylvania. Pollard’s 5-year-old granddaughter was inside the car, unharmed. She told troopers that she was waiting in the car for her grandmother.

Pollard lives across the street from the restaurant, The Associated Press reported.

Troopers noticed a sinkhole nearby and believed she may have fallen into it. People at the restaurant said they last saw her looking for her cat on Monday at around 5 p.m. The hole is about the size of a manhole and wasn’t there when hunters and restaurant workers had been in the area a few hours before Pollard’s disappearance.

There were no signs of Pollard other than a shoe about 30 feet below the surface, WPXI and the AP reported. There have been no sounds coming from below the earth, but oxygen levels were good and the temperature was warmer beneath the surface than above.

The sinkhole was a very thin layer of dirt but was mainly grass.

“It almost feels like it opened up with her standing on top of it,” State Police spokesperson Trooper Steve Limani said, according to the AP.

A construction crew was called in to excavate the area around the sink hole and fire officials are working with the Pennsylvania Bureau of Mines.

“The village of Marguerite, Pleasant Unity, a lot of little villages around here are old coal patch towns. Very common to find a lot of mines in these areas, obviously a concern to have these mine subsidence issues,” Pleasant Unity Fire Chief John Bacha told WPXI.

The area under the sinkhole is likely from the Marguerite Mine, operated by the H.C. Frick Coke Company and closed in 1952. The coal seam is about 20 feet below the surface, the AP reported.

The mine’s structural integrity has become compromised because of water that was being pushed into the mines to break down the materials so excavation slowed and new ways to search were being developed, WPXI reported.

Once the search is done, the Pennsylvania Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation will survey the scene to see if the sinkhole was caused by mine subsidence, the AP reported.

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