Nepal headteacher's 10-minute decision saves 900 students from catastrophic floods

Rajendra Dawadi was sitting in his office at Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School in Nuwakot when the phone began to ring. It was 09:10 on a Wednesday morning, and the calls came in rapid succession—four separate warnings in the space of minutes, each one carrying the same urgent message: a catastrophic flood was heading toward the school. Within ten minutes, Dawadi had made a decision that would alter the course of 900 lives.

The warnings arrived from different sources, each one lending credibility to the last. A parent appeared at the school gates, frantic to collect her daughter, saying a massive flood was coming. Dawadi understood that parents do not rush without reason. He did not hesitate. He ordered the children to run to higher ground. Buses full of students were turned around mid-route and redirected away from the danger zone. The evacuation was chaotic but swift—a single decision made in the narrow window between warning and catastrophe.

Yunisha Amatya was sixteen years old and sitting in class when the teachers suddenly appeared with urgent instructions to leave. She and her friends did not fully grasp the severity of what was happening. They scrambled uphill through an escape route behind the school, moving as quickly as their legs could carry them. One student fainted from the shock. Others had waited for classmates still in a mathematics lesson, losing precious seconds. Yunisha felt her friends' hands pulling her upward through a narrow ladder at the back of the building. Within moments, the bazaar—the local market that had stood in front of the school—was simply gone, swept away as if it had never existed. She had escaped by ten seconds.

The floodwaters arrived with a violence that defied preparation. A hostel building standing only one hundred meters from the river was engulfed immediately. The school building itself was buried under mud and debris. Students and teachers who had reached higher ground—a few hundred meters uphill—huddled together in shock, then made their way to a neighboring village. Roads were cut off. Transport was disrupted. Many remained stranded for two nights, waiting for rescue efforts to reach them.

Back home, Yunisha's parents were living through their own nightmare. Her mother, Sabina Kumari Shrestha, tried calling her daughter repeatedly. The calls would not connect. Her husband, Yubaraj Amatya, jumped on his scooter and headed toward the school, only to find the bazaar completely destroyed. He thought his daughter was dead. For nearly an hour, he kept calling with no answer. Then the phone connected. Yunisha's voice came through the line. He broke down. Two relatives with him wept and embraced him. Yunisha, hearing her father's tears, could not speak.

The family waited three days for her return. When she finally arrived home on Friday, her mother said she felt relief wash over her—a relief so complete that even her younger daughter, who had not slept since the flood, could finally rest. But Yunisha's mind had already moved to what came next. She was worried about her studies. If she had to change schools, she would lose her friends and face the difficulty of starting over. The flood had taken much from her, and the loss extended beyond the immediate danger.

Rajendra Dawadi, the headteacher who made the ten-minute decision, reflected on what might have happened if he had waited. "If we didn't make a quick decision, if it was 10 minutes later, we all—including the students and me—wouldn't be able to speak to you today," he said. He felt pride in what he had done, but he also saw a gap in the system. Better warning infrastructure—sirens, evacuation alerts, formal alert systems—could have given residents more time to respond. He imagined what would have happened if he had decided to close the school only after the scheduled period ended at 9:30. "Nothing might be left," he said, "only the bell would be ringing."

The floods that swept through Nepal on that Wednesday claimed at least 794 lives and left 2,426 people missing. The disaster was catastrophic and widespread. But at Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School, nine hundred students and their teachers lived because one man listened to four phone calls and trusted his instinct to act immediately. The margin between survival and tragedy had been measured in seconds.