When climate, technology, and greed collide

Regarding the recent Chinese coal mine flooding disaster, Bruce Sterling writes:

There's not a coal mine in the world that could avert nine inches of sudden Greenhouse rain. Those miners were digging their own graves.

It seems from later reports that there was in fact a simple way to avoid disaster, though not flooding. Just stop working.

After unusually heavy rains lashed the area around the small city of Xintai, 370 miles southeast of Beijing, last week, at least two other mines stopped production Friday, hours before the Wen River smashed through the dike ...
Wang Dequan, a government official in the city of Tai'an, which oversees Xintai, said, "Smaller mines stopped work during heavy rains because they lack the safety equipment that larger mines like the Huayuan mine have."

Undue trust in technology may even have been key in leading to this disaster.