After two days of excavation, Pennsylvania state police say the grandmother believed to have fallen into a 30-foot sinkhole probably didn’t survive.
“Unless it’s a miracle, mostly likely this is recovery,” Trooper Steve Limani, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania State Police, said at a press conference on Wednesday night, according to The New York Times.
64-year-old Elizabeth Pollard was out looking for her cat on Monday evening and parked her car at a restaurant adjacent a concealed mine that had been abandoned for 75 years.
Limani told journalists that the sinkhole likely opened up “during the time while, unfortunately, Ms. Pollard was walking around.” Police subsequently found her vehicle—with her five-year-old granddaughter seated inside—next to a deep, manhole-sized pit.
Rescue crews have been digging since Tuesday morning, trying to find Pollard, but have “had no signs of any form of life or anything” to indicate that they should “continue to try and push and rush and push the envelope,” Limani said, per the Associated Press.
As the mine becomes increasingly unstable, conditions are getting too dangerous for the crews, the AP reports; the mine’s roof has caved in at several points and oxygen levels are low under ground.
Workers “come out of there head to toe covered in mud, exhausted,” Limani said. “And while they were getting pulled up, the next group’s getting dropped in. And there was one after the next after the next.”
The odds of Pollard’s survival were low from the start, but rescuers got to work immediately. Now, they plan to substantially expand the sinkhole so that they can uncover and stabilize more of the mine, with severe winter weather threatening the region.
“We’re hoping everyone keeps the family in their prayers, that this ends up being a rescue mission,” Limani said. “That’s how we’re going to continue to conduct ourselves.”
