Mining

In Pennsylvania, where coal is plentiful, wealthy mining corporations extract anthracite (hard) coal in the eastern counties - predominantly in Schuylkill and Luzerne Counties. Corporations have engaged in strip mining and room and pillar mining for more than a century, ever since individual land-holders and entrepreneurs were squeezed out in the first round of corporate take-over of productive enterprises in America, just prior to and after the Civil War. In these counties the waste and environmental destruction is evident everywhere, and long-untended mining pits are now targeted for "reclamation" with the proposed transportation and dumping of waste materials from coal-fired electric plants - in the form of coal ash, plus kiln dust and river dredging....as well as sewage sludge trucked in from urban waste water facilities.

In 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Pennsylvania state law that required coal corporations to leave pillars of coal in the mines to hold up the surface and prevent the unsupported collapse into the ground of land, homes, fields, streams, wells, roads etc. into the mined-out voids underground. In Pennsylvania Coal Company v. Mahon, the unelected court judges decreed that the state could not require the corporation to leave behind, underground, pillars of its "property" (the coal) since that would be an uncompensated "taking" pf private property by the government. The court declared that the 5th amendment property rights protections for corporations  outweighed the human and civil rights of people and communities.

In the western parts of the Commonwealth, bituminous (soft) coal is the target of corporate mining operations. The "modern" technique for extracting this fossil fuel is called "long-wall mining." The devastation to communities, the environment, ground and surface water is notorious, yet state agencies continue to issue licenses to destroy (permits).
As reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

To accommodate longwall mining, the state Legislature, on the day before Christmas in 1994, passed Act 54, a law proposed and partly written by the coal industry. The new law allowed coal companies to dig under homes and other structures built before 1966, as long as the property owner was compensated for subsidence damage and water loss. Before 1994, coal companies had to leave pillars of coal to support such homes, including historic or architecturally significant structures.
-- Don Hopey, How Longwall Mining Works (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

Thus, under Act 54 and its implementing regulations, the law now permits the undermining of homes, perennial streams, and private water supplies as long as the coal operator agrees to “repair” the structural damage and “replace” water supplies. Whereas prior to 1994 such subsidence was prohibited outright, Act 54 incorporated planned subsidence into the permits themselves, requiring only “after the fact” attempts to remedy harms and damages resulting from the subsidence.