A woman who went missing while looking for her cat was likely swallowed by a sinkhole, authorities have said.
Elizabeth Pollard vanished after leaving with her granddaughter to search for her pet on Monday evening in Pennsylvania, but her family alerted authorities when she had not returned by the early hours of Tuesday.
The 64-year-old’s vehicle was found with her unharmed five-year-old granddaughter inside around two hours later near a freshly opened sinkhole above a long-closed, crumbling mine.
But police say the search operation has now turned into a recovery effort, after two treacherous days of digging through mud and rock produced no signs of life.
Pennsylvania State Police spokesperson Trooper Steve Limani said authorities no longer believed they would find Ms Pollard alive, but that work to find her remains continued.
“Unless it’s a miracle, most likely this is a recovery,” he said.
There has been no signs of any form of life or anything to make rescuers think they should continue the search effort, he said, noting that oxygen levels below ground were insufficient.
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“We feel like we failed. It’s tough.”
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He praised the crews who went into the abandoned mine to help remove material during the search for Ms Pollard in the village of Marguerite, around 40 miles east of Pittsburgh.
Authorities had said earlier that the roof of the mine had collapsed in several places and was not stable.
“We did get, you know, where we wanted, where we thought that she was at. We’ve been to that spot,” Pleasant Unity Fire chief John Bacha, the incident’s operations officer, said.
“What happened at that point, I don’t know, maybe the slurry of mud pushed her in one direction. There were several different seams of that mine, shafts that all came together where this happened.”
Geological engineer Paul Santi, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines, said the chances of Ms Pollard surviving if she slipped into the sinkhole were “pretty small.”
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“I would be surprised if she came through this OK,” he said.
“It would require that she wasn’t killed by the fall, she wasn’t killed by the rock, that there was an air pocket and she’s able to survive in it.”
Sinkholes occur regularly in the area because of subsidence from coal mining activity.
Mr Limani said the searchers met with Ms Pollard’s family before announcing the shift from rescue to recovery.
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“I think they get it,” he said.
Ms Pollard’s son, Axel Hayes, described her as a happy woman who at one point owned 10 cats. She and her husband adopted Mr Hayes and his twin brother when they were infants.
He called her “a great person overall, a great mother” who “never really did anybody wrong.”
