Thin hope of finding sinkhole victim alive

(AP):

The search for a woman who is believed to have fallen into a sinkhole in western Pennsylvania has become a recovery effort after two treacherous days of digging through mud and rock produced no signs of life, authorities said on Wednesday.

The crew working to find 64-year-old Elizabeth Pollard packed up Wednesday evening and planned to return today. During a news conference, Pennsylvania State Police spokesperson Trooper Steve Limani said that authorities no longer believe they will find Pollard alive, but that work to find her remains continues.

"We've had no signs of any form of life or anything" to make rescuers think they should "continue to try and push and rush and push the envelope, to be aggressive with the potential of risking harm to other people," Limani said. He noted that oxygen levels below ground were insufficient.

Emergency crews and others have been trying to locate Pollard for two days. Her relatives reported her missing early Tuesday, and her vehicle with her unharmed five-year-old granddaughter inside was found about two hours later, near what is thought to be a freshly opened sinkhole above a long closed, crumbling mine.

"We feel like we failed," Limani said of the decision to change the status of the effort from a rescue to a recovery. "It's tough."

Limani praised the crews who went into the abandoned mine to help remove material in the search for Pollard in the village of Marguerite, about 40 miles (65 kilometres) east of Pittsburgh.

"They would come out of there head to toe covered in mud, exhausted. And while they were getting pulled up, the next group's getting dropped in. And there was one after the next after the next," Limani said.

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 earlier on Wednesday. "What happened at that point, I don't know, maybe the slurry of mud pushed her one direction. There were several different seams of that mine, shafts that all came together where this happened at."

Searchers were using electronic devices and cameras as surface digging continued with the use of heavy equipment, Bacha said. In the coming days, they plan to greatly widen the surface hole, with winter weather forecast in the region.

Geological engineer Paul Santi said the chances of Pollard surviving if she slipped into the sinkhole were "pretty small."

"There's a lot of problems," said Santi, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines . "There's rock and soil and things that could have buried her. There is water that could have filled it. You have to go through with the rescue. But I would be surprised if she came through this OK ... 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 in the area because of subsidence from coal mining activity. Rescuers had been using water to break down and remove clay and dirt from the mine, which has been closed since the 1950s.