'The flood is coming': How a Nepal principal saved 900 students

Rajendra Dawadi was inside his school near Nepal’s Trishuli River with around 900 students last week when a colleague delivered an urgent warning.

“My accountant came to the school and said, ‘The flood is coming, the flood is coming’,” the school principal told AFP in a recent interview.

Dawadi quickly ordered an evacuation, and teachers hurried hundreds of students from classrooms to higher ground.

Minutes later, the 47-year-old watched the Trishuli Bazaar Secondary School he had run for years collapse into a raging torrent.

“If the information was wrong, we would lose a day of schooling,” he recalled of the morning of August 26. “But if it was true, we were going to lose our lives.” Students were panicked, Dawadi said, and one girl fainted.

Bus drivers bringing in other students were asked to turn back, including one driver who had just entered school grounds.

But the timely evacuation saved some 900 lives.

Now, standing above the scarred banks of the river in Nuwakot district more than a week after the disaster, Dawadi described himself simply as “a principal without a school”.

The tsunami-like wall of water, ice and debris unleashed by a massive glacial and rock collapse along the Nepal-China border killed at least 1,362 people and has left more than 5,500 missing across the two countries.

“I found my mother as I stepped out of the helicopter,” she said. “She hugged me and started to cry. My mind just stopped working.” Her mother, Durga Dotel, had feared the worst.

“Seeing the river in flood, I had lost all hope that my daughter had survived,” she said.

According to figures cited by Save the Children, at least 69 schools were destroyed or damaged, disrupting the education of nearly 19,000 children.

Dawadi said the disaster was “far worse” than the earthquake that hit Nepal in 2015.

“The school had been completely destroyed (after the earthquake), but we rebuilt it,” he said.

“This time, we’ve lost the land and the building. We need a school again. But first, we need somewhere safe to build it.”