Rajendra Dawadi was inside Trishuli Bazaar Secondary School with about 900 students when an urgent warning reached him.
“The flood is coming, the flood is coming,” an accountant told the principal.
Dawadi immediately ordered an evacuation. Teachers rushed students out of their classrooms and toward higher ground.
Minutes later, the 47-year-old principal watched the school he had led for years disappear into a powerful torrent.
He later said the decision carried enormous risks. If the warning proved wrong, the school would lose a day of classes. If it proved right, hundreds of lives could be at risk.
Principal orders a rapid evacuation
The students panicked as teachers moved them away from the school.
Dawadi said one girl fainted during the evacuation. Bus drivers carrying additional students were told to turn around.
One driver had already entered the school grounds when staff asked him to leave.
The evacuation ultimately saved about 900 students, according to Dawadi.
However, the disaster still claimed lives near the school. Five students died in the flooding outside the school, along with a teacher and a security worker, Dawadi said.
The security worker had left after Dawadi. The principal believes he may have stayed behind to close the school gate.
More than a week after the disaster, Dawadi stood near the damaged banks of the Trishuli River in Nuwakot district.
He described his situation in simple terms.
“I’m a principal without a school.”
Flood destroys school where principal once studied
Dawadi said authorities in Trishuli Bazaar had not provided an evacuation plan before the disaster.
As floodwaters rose, some residents tried to cross a bridge. The current swept some of them away.
Others escaped toward higher ground.
Dawadi remembered looking back at the school after the evacuation began.
“When I looked back, the school was standing there like the finest of buildings, and in five minutes, everything collapsed,” he recalled.
The school also held personal significance for him. Dawadi had studied there himself.
“There was nothing left,” he said.
The destruction came years after Nepal rebuilt the school following the devastating 2015 earthquake.
Dawadi said the latest disaster felt even worse.
The earthquake destroyed the school building, but the community managed to rebuild it. This time, the flood destroyed both the building and the land on which it stood.
Student describes terrifying escape
Santoshi Dotel, 17, was attending an accounting class when teachers ordered the evacuation.
At first, she did not understand how serious the situation had become.
She and a friend later went toward the river. They hoped to cross and reach her family home.
Then the water suddenly surged.
“The bridge was swept away,” Santoshi said.
She began crying because she feared she would never reach her family again. Her friend eventually pulled her toward a hillside as the flood rushed below them.
Santoshi spent hours without knowing whether her parents were alive.
Four days later, a helicopter finally reunited her with her family.
“I found my mother as I stepped out of the helicopter,” she said. “She hugged me and started to cry.”
Her mother, Durga Dotel, had feared that her daughter had died.
“Seeing the river in flood, I had lost all hope that my daughter had survived,” she said.
Nepal schools face major disruption
The disaster has also caused widespread damage to education.
Figures cited by Save the Children indicate that at least 69 schools were destroyed or damaged. The damage disrupted the education of nearly 19,000 children.
For Dawadi, rebuilding the school will now be a major challenge.
He said the community needs a new school, but safety must come first.
“This time, we’ve lost the land and the building,” he said. “We need a school again. But first, we need somewhere safe to build it.”
The principal’s decision to evacuate quickly prevented an even greater tragedy. Yet the loss of the school has left him and his community facing the difficult task of rebuilding after one of Nepal’s most devastating recent disasters.
