Four reports arriving in a few minutes made it possible to avoid the tragedy
Four notices arrived within a few minutes. Then the most difficult decision: interrupting lessons and ordering hundreds of students to leave school immediately. Thus Rajendra Dawadi, principal of the Tribhuvan Trishuli secondary school in Nuwakot, Nepal, managed to evacuate 900 of the just over 1600 students towards the hilly areas, moments before the tragedy. The BBC reports it.
The first reports spoke of rapidly rising waters and above all of the already dramatic situation in Betrawati, further upstream, where floods had begun to overwhelm the settlement.
“Even if the flood hadn’t come, it was just a matter of missing a day of school,” the headteacher later told the BBC. The decision to put safety ahead of the school calendar turned out to be the right one. A few minutes after the evacuation to the hilly areas, a dormitory 100 meters from the river was completely submerged.
“If we had made the decision 10 minutes later, none of us, including the students, would be here talking to you today,” the principal said. One of the 900 students saved thanks to the principal’s decision, Yunisha, a 16-year-old girl, says she escaped the flood only moments before it arrived. “My friends and I only survived for 10 seconds.” Yunisha said she ran along a narrow muddy path behind the school with other students. “In an instant, everything was swept away before my eyes,” he added.
Yunisha, interviewed by the BBC together with her mother Sabina Shrestha, says that the family spent hours desperately trying to contact her after hearing the news of the flood. “I was in a panic. I tried calling my daughter and her father several times, but neither of them could be reached.
I’m so happy and relieved. God saved my little girl.”
