Rajendra Dawadi was inside his school near Nepal’s Trishuli River with around 900 students on August 26 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 said 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 in Nuwakot district, which he had run for years, collapse into a raging torrent.
“If the information were wrong, we would lose a day of schooling,” he recalled of the morning. “But if it was true, we were going to lose our lives.”
Students 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 the school grounds. The timely evacuation saved some 900 lives.
Standing above the scarred river banks weeks after the disaster, Dawadi described himself 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 has killed at least 1,398 people and left more than 5,510 missing across both countries.
Outside the school, five students, a teacher and a security staff member died in the flooding.
Authorities in Trishuli Bazaar had not provided an evacuation plan, Dawadi said. Some residents tried to cross the bridge but were swept away. Others took refuge on higher ground.
“When I looked back, the school was standing there like the finest of buildings,” Dawadi recalled. “In five minutes, everything collapsed ... It’s also the school where I studied. There was nothing left.”
Santoshi Dotel, 17, was in an accounting class when Dawadi’s evacuation order came. At first, she struggled to comprehend the danger:
“We never would have thought the flood could reach such a scale,” Dotel said. She initially went down to the river with her friend to try to cross and reach her family home.
Then the water surged.
“The bridge was swept away,” she said. “I started to cry because I thought I would never get home and that there was nothing we could do.”
Her friend pulled her up the hillside as the flood roared below.
Santoshi broke down as she recalled the anguish of not knowing whether her parents had survived. It was only days later that a helicopter reunited her with her family.
Her mother had feared the worst: “Seeing the river in flood, I had lost all hope that my daughter had survived.”
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: “This time, we’ve lost the land and the building. We need a school again. But first, we need somewhere safe to build it.”
