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.

Summary

Authorities in Marguerite, Pennsylvania, are searching for Elizabeth Pollard, 64, who disappeared while looking for her cat. A nearby sinkhole, likely caused by abandoned coal mine subsidence, is the focus of the search.

Pollard’s car was found with her 5-year-old granddaughter unharmed inside.

A shoe was discovered 30 feet down the sinkhole, but no other signs of Pollard have been detected.

Crews are cautiously excavating unstable ground and exploring mine voids. The Pennsylvania DEP will investigate the sinkhole’s cause after the search concludes.

  • themeatbridge
    47•1 day ago

    Pennsylvania overdeveloped tons of residential and rural land on top of limestone and dolomite deposits. For a hundred years, we’ve been clearing and paving and tilling land, creating groundwater aquifers that slowly erode the subterranean minerals, leaving invisible death traps all over the state. Local building codes have overcorrected with extremely restrictive stormwater management requirements that make it expensive to develop new land (not that this is a bad thing).

    • @LaunchesKayaks
      6•15 hours ago

      I live in swpa and it’s the norm to assume every house has mine shafts under it. Some are obviously worse than others, but the mines are so extensive that you could dig anywhere and probably find one

    • WxFischEnglish
      9•1 day ago

      In this case it seems to be abandoned mine subsidence which at least in SWPA (where this happened, outside of Latrobe in Westmoreland county) is a huge issue. We had to do a search when we bought our house to see if there were known abandoned mines on our property which would have required we bought subsidence Insurance from DEP.