How A Principal’s Quick Thinking Saved 900 Students From Devastating Floods

A school principal is being praised for saving hundreds of his students from the devastating flood in Nepal last week.

Rajendra Dawadi was teaching a class at the Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School in Nuwakot, a district north of the country’s capital of Kathmandu, when a member of the staff alerted him that the flood was imminent. Rather than wait it out, Dawadi promptly evacuated the gathered students and instructed bus drivers who were on their way to school to reverse course.

Of the school’s 1,643 students, around 900 were on the campus when the flooding began, the Associated Press reported. Luckily, the older children started first, and the young kids weren’t scheduled to arrive at the school until later in the morning. The younger kids on buses were also taken to safety because of Dawadi’s urgent warning.

“[The students] were old enough to run immediately,” the principal told The New York Times during a phone interview on Monday. “It would not have been possible to save everyone, had kindergarten and primary school students also been there.”

“A couple of students became traumatized and fainted,” Dawadi said. Those children were reportedly scooped up by teachers and evacuated on motorbikes. 

“I thought that even if the warning turned out to be wrong, the worst it would cost us was one day of study,” Dawadi told the outlet of making the call to evacuate. “But taking it lightly could mean the loss of hundreds of lives.”

The building was completely destroyed in the flood.

“I am extremely emotional to see the school completely swept away,” Dawadi said of the school he attended as a child before becoming the principal. “The school holds so many memories for me.”

“We saved lives, but now there is no place to teach the students,” he added. “I am already worried about how we can start teaching and learning again.”

The death toll continues to rise after a catastrophic flood swept through the Nepal-China border last Wednesday, sweeping away whole villages and damaging infrastructure. Around 1,000 people are dead and thousands remain missing, including around 85 Americans.

The flood was reportedly triggered when a wall of rock and mud collapsed into a river near the border between Nepal and China-controlled Tibet. 

The flood swept the region, snapping bridges, toppling buildings, and leaving people stranded in its wake. The president of the Nepal Center for Disaster Management said the flood came like a “tsunami from the sky.”