Rajendra Dawadi was inside his classroom when a colleague rushed in with a warning: Floodwaters were racing through Nepal’s Trishuli Valley, tearing apart homes, bridges and entire villages.
The danger had not yet been confirmed, but Dawadi, the principal, had little time to act. Then a teacher received another warning by phone. Moments later, a parent arrived to take her child home. He rang the school bell and ordered his students and staff out of the building and toward higher ground. As he followed them to a nearby hill, the floodwaters rose behind him. From the safety of the hillside, he turned to watch the school where he had once been a student — and where he had spent years teaching — disappear beneath a torrent of water, mud, boulders and debris. Two staff members could not make it and remain missing. Dawadi ordered those already there to leave and called bus drivers to tell them not to come. The bus crossed a newly constructed bridge and, moments later, the old bridge beside it collapsed. For Dawadi, the scale of the destruction has become personal, as the school had been both his workplace and a large part of his life.
Dawadi’s decision to evacuate the school saved at least 900 students from last week’s devastating flash floods in Nepal, unleashed after a glacial collapse in the Himalayas. The disaster killed over 1,000 people in Nepal and Tibet, while more than 4,400 remain missing. The Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School had 1,643 students. At least 900 were on campus that morning, while some students were still making their way to school.
“I immediately decided to stop … school” and get the children out, he told The Associated Press. One bus, packed with students, had already reached the school when Dawadi told the driver to turn back, he said.
