Nepal headteacher's quick decision saves 900 children from flash flood

Rajendra Dawadi was sitting in his office at Tribhuvan Trishuli secondary school in Nuwakot when the warnings started arriving. Four separate messages came through within minutes—people calling from upstream, from Betrawati, a town directly in the path of what was coming. They told him the water was massive, moving fast, and heading his way. He did not hesitate. He ordered the school's 900 students to stop their classes and move immediately to higher ground.

It was Wednesday morning when the glacial collapse happened high in the Himalayas, at the Nepal-Tibet border. A glacier gave way, and the result was a wall of water and debris that tore down the mountainside with nothing to stop it. Dawadi had maybe minutes of warning. He used them. As the children were being evacuated, moving up a muddy path away from the school, Dawadi watched a hostel building about 100 metres from the river get swallowed whole by the flood. The water came with such force that it swept through the bazaar in front of him. "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 told the BBC afterward. He was not exaggerating.

Yunisha, a 16-year-old student at the school, described the evacuation in terms that made the margin of survival concrete. "I, along with my friends, survived by just 10 seconds," she said. She ran up that muddy path with her classmates, watching the bazaar disappear into the torrent. She did not see her family again for three days. But she was alive. All 900 of them were.

The broader disaster was catastrophic. The glacial collapse sent a torrent downstream that killed 781 people across Nepal. Another 2,502 were reported missing or out of contact, including 592 foreigners. More than 3,700 people have been rescued so far. The destruction extended far beyond Nuwakot. At least 69 schools across the affected regions were destroyed or damaged, displacing nearly 19,000 children from their classrooms. In Dhading, one of the hardest-hit areas, other groups of schoolchildren survived only because they happened to be at lunch when the water came, or because teachers made the same split-second decision Dawadi made—to get out now, ask questions later.

One mother told the Associated Press how her child's teachers had shouted a simple instruction: leave everything, the bags, the lunch boxes, just go. That decision saved lives too. The pattern was clear: the people who survived were the ones who moved first and moved fast. There was no time for debate, no time for protocol. Dawadi understood this. He said later that even if the flood had not come, losing a single day of classes was nothing compared to the risk of staying put.

Nepal's government has begun linking this disaster to the broader climate crisis. The foreign minister called for a global response, pointing out that Nepal has contributed almost nothing to the world's fossil fuel emissions yet has become, in his words, a "major victim of climate change." The glacial collapse that triggered this flood is itself a symptom of warming temperatures in the high mountains. The question of what comes next—how to prepare for more of these events, how to warn people faster, how to build schools in safer places—hangs over the country as the death toll stabilizes and the work of recovery begins.