64-year-old US woman, looking for her cat, feared swallowed by sinkhole

Authorities fear a grandmother who disappeared while looking for her cat may have been swallowed up by a sinkhole that recently opened up in a western Pennsylvania village.

Crews lowered a pole camera with a sensitive listening device into the hole in Marguerite on Tuesday morning but detected nothing. A second camera lowered into the hole showed what could be a shoe.

The family of Elizabeth Pollard, 64, called police at about 1 am Tuesday to say she had not been seen since going out Monday evening to search for Pepper, her cat.

Police said they found Pollard's car parked near Monday's Union Restaurant in Marguerite, about 65 kilometres east of Pittsburgh. Pollard's 5-year-old granddaughter was found safe inside the car.

The manhole-sized opening had not been seen by hunters and restaurant workers who were in the area in the hours before Pollard's disappearance, leading rescuers to speculate the sinkhole was new.

“We are pretty confident we are in the right place. We’re hoping there is still a void she could be in,” Pleasant Valley Volunteer Fire Company Chief John Bacha told Triblive.

Dozens of firefighters on the scene used an excavator, ladders and hoses to remove material from around the edges and inside the sinkhole as they searched for Pollard. The opening of the sinkhole, originally about the size of a utility access hole cover, had grown to about the size of a small backyard swimming pool by Tuesday evening.

A Pennsylvania State Police spokesperson, Trooper Steve Limani, said the shoe was about 30 feet (9 meters) below the surface.

“It almost feels like it opened up with her standing on top of it,” Limani said.

Pollard lives in a small neighbourhood across the street from where her car and granddaughter were located, Limani said.

The young girl “nodded off in the car and woke up. Grandma never came back," Limani said. The child stayed in the car until two troopers rescued her. It's not clear what happened to Pepper.

Police said sinkholes, which are depressions in the ground, occur in the area because of subsidence from coal mining activity. Sinkholes are fairly common due to collapsed caves, old mines or dissolving material, Paul Santi, a professor of geological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, said earlier this year.

A team from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, which responded to the scene, concluded the underground void is likely the result of work in the Marguerite Mine, last operated by the HC Frick Coke Company in 1952. The Pittsburgh coal seam is about 6 metres below the surface in that area.

Department of Environmental Protection spokesperson Neil Shader said the state’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation will examine the scene after the search is over to see if the sinkhole was indeed caused by mine subsidence.