# Nepal principal's quick evacuation saves 900 students before floodwaters destroy school
Event date: 2026-08-31
Rajendra Dawadi took a warning seriously at Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School in Bidur, Nuwakot District, Nepal, when a colleague rushed in with news that floodwaters were racing through the Trishuli Valley and another teacher received a warning by phone. He rang the school bell, ordered students and staff out of the building and sent them toward higher ground before the flash flood reached the campus. The quick decision saved at least 900 students from a disaster that later erased the school itself.
The sequence was almost improvised. A parent arrived to take one child home, and Dawadi had already begun clearing the campus. He also called bus drivers to tell them not to come, and one bus already carrying students was told to turn back. That bus crossed a newly built bridge and, moments later, the older bridge next to it collapsed. By the time Dawadi reached a nearby hill with the students and staff, the floodwaters were rising behind him.
Dawadi said the school had 1,643 students in all, with at least 900 on campus that morning and some others still on the way. Two staff members could not make it out and remain missing. He watched from higher ground as the school where he once studied and later taught disappeared under water, mud, boulders and debris. The personal scale of the loss is part of why his story has resonated so widely across Nepal.
The wider disaster was grim. Nepal's flash floods, triggered after a glacial collapse in the Himalayas, killed over 950 people in Nepal and Tibet, while more than 4,400 people remained missing. Aid group Save the Children said at least 69 schools in northern Nepal were destroyed, putting nearly 19,000 students at risk of losing classroom time. Dawadi has said students will need counseling and that lessons should resume, even if the school has to move temporarily.
Dawadi's relief was matched by grief. When he returned to the site days later, parents hugged him and cried, while one student said she would thank him for saving her life. He has said the rescue was not heroic but a responsibility, and that the next steps are practical: counseling for students, a temporary learning site and a rebuild that lets lessons restart even if the original campus cannot be restored quickly. In a region where roads, bridges and school buildings were washed away at once, that focus on the everyday work of recovery matters as much as the evacuation itself.
