14-minute warning saves over 900 students from Nepal floods

Headmaster Rajendra Dawadi was inside his school in Nepal's Bidur last Wednesday when his accountant burst in, shouting that a flood was coming.

Headmaster Rajendra Dawadi was inside his school in Nepal’s Bidur last Wednesday when his accountant burst in, shouting that a flood was coming. That single warning helped save the lives of 900 students and 16 staff members.

Teachers at Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School had already started receiving panicked calls from worried relatives and friends. At the same time, a roaring wave of mud and water was tearing through the valley upstream, flattening entire towns in its path.

The accountant had received a call from a relative in Rasuwa, the area hit first by the flood. That call gave the school just 14 minutes to evacuate everyone safely.

The decision proved lifesaving in a disaster that has now killed over 900 people, with thousands still missing. The school itself was rebuilt after Nepal’s devastating 2015 earthquake, which killed around 9,000 people. It stood on a narrow strip of land squeezed between the Trishuli river and a hydropower canal.

“We immediately said, stop the class, ring the bell,” Dawadi told Reuters. The school no longer exists, and its former site now sits inside the riverbed.

At the time of the warning, more than 900 of the school’s roughly 1,600 students were on campus. Dawadi quickly redirected incoming buses carrying more students toward safer ground. As panic spread, at least one student fainted during the evacuation.

Parents and teachers rushed in on motorbikes to collect their children. Others were driven to safety in buses or ran toward higher ground on foot.

Around 14 minutes later, the last bus crossed a nearby bridge just as the flood reached the town of 60,000 people. Dawadi said the old bridge collapsed moments after their bus crossed the new one.

Dawadi, who once studied at the very school he now leads, is urging authorities to rebuild it in a safer location soon.

For many others in Bidur, the warning came too late. At least one school staffer and the accountant’s mother remain missing. The accountant had rushed home afterward to save his parents, managing to get his father uphill in time. When he returned for his mother, though, the house had already been swept away.