Nepal headteacher evacuates 900 children moments before deadly flash flood

A headteacher in Nepal evacuated 900 children from a school moments before a deadly wall of water struck their town amid the devastating flash floods that have killed almost 800 people and left thousands missing.

Rajendra Dawadi decided to halt classes and order children to higher ground after receiving warnings about the scale of the flooding heading their way.

Dawadi, the headteacher at Tribhuvan Trishuli secondary school in Nuwakot, which has 1,600 pupils, said he had received four warnings from different people within minutes, including one from Betrawati, a town directly upstream.

This prompted him to take immediate action. “I decided I shouldn’t delay any more,” he told the BBC. “Even if the flood was not coming, it was just a matter of a single day’s classes.”

Dawadi said during the evacuation of the school he saw a hostel building about 100 metres from the river being engulfed by the torrent of flood water.

“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 said.

One student said Dawadi’s decision had saved their lives with moments to spare. Yunisha, 16, told reporters: “I, along with my friends, survived by just 10 seconds.”

She described the children running up a muddy path to escape as water and debris inundated the town. “Within no time, the bazaar was swept away in front of my eyes,” she said. She was reunited with her family three days later.

At least 69 schools have been destroyed or damaged by the floods, affecting nearly 19,000 children, according to the charity Save the Children.

In Dhading, one of the areas worst hit by the floods, a group of schoolchildren survived the disaster when they left their classroom for their lunch break.

Others in the area escaped when teachers told them to quickly evacuate classrooms just before the waters came crashing in.

The mother of one child told the Associated Press that teachers had warned students: “There is a flood and you should leave bags and tiffins. That’s how they managed to survive.”

More than 3,700 people have been rescued in Nepal so far. The country said on Sunday 2,502 people, including 592 foreigners, were out of contact. It reported an updated death toll of 781 people.

The disaster, which struck the Nepal-Tibet border region of the Himalayas on Wednesday morning, was caused by a glacial collapse that sent a wall of water and debris cascading downstream, the US Geological Survey said.

Nepal’s foreign minister has called for a global response to the climate crisis, saying the Nepali people had disproportionately become “major victims of climate change” despite having contributed a fraction of the planet’s fossil fuel emissions.