A headteacher in Nuwakot, Nepal, successfully evacuated 900 children from a school just moments before a devastating wall of water struck their town during flash floods that have killed nearly 800 people.
Rajendra Dawadi, the headteacher of the 1,600-pupil Tribhuvan Trishuli secondary school, decided to halt classes and order the students to higher ground after receiving rapid warnings about the impending torrent. Within minutes, Dawadi received four separate warnings from different sources, including one from the upstream town of Betrawati.
This prompted him to take immediate action. “I decided I shouldn’t delay any more,” he told the BBC. “Even if the flood was not coming, it was just a matter of a single day’s classes.”
As the evacuation was underway, Dawadi watched as a hostel building located about 100 meters from the river was engulfed by the rushing floodwaters. "If we had made the decision 10 minutes later, all of us, including the students and me, would not be able to speak to you today," he added.
One local resident described the scene of children scrambling up a muddy path to escape as water and debris inundated the area. She recalled seeing the bazaar swept away in front of her eyes before she was finally reunited with her family three days later.
The catastrophic flooding has severely impacted education in the region. According to the charity Save the Children, at least 69 schools have been damaged or destroyed, affecting nearly 19,000 children. Similar narrow escapes occurred in Dhading, one of the worst-hit areas, where a group of schoolchildren survived because they had left their classroom for lunch. In other instances, teachers ordered pupils to flee immediately. The mother of one child told the Associated Press that teachers had warned students: “There is a flood and you should leave bags and tiffins. That’s how they managed to survive.”
The disaster began on Wednesday morning in the Himalayan region along the Nepal-Tibet border, triggered by a glacial collapse that unleashed a massive wall of water and debris downstream, according to the US Geological Survey. On Sunday, officials reported that the death toll had risen to 781, with more than 3,700 people rescued. However, 2,502 people, including 592 foreign nationals, remain out of contact.
In the wake of the devastation, Nepal’s foreign minister has called for a global response to the climate crisis, saying the Nepali people had disproportionately become “major victims of climate change” despite having contributed a fraction of the planet’s fossil fuel emissions.
