- Rajendra Dawadi evacuated 900 students during Nepal flash floods
- Dawadi coordinated the evacuation while teachers and staff led students to safety
- Floodwaters destroyed the school and local structures within minutes
Some heroes don't wear capes, they ring school bells. As catastrophic flash floods tore through Nepal, one school principal's quick thinking meant that not a single one of his 900 students lost their lives. Rajendra Dawadi has now spoken to NDTV about the morning he evacuated his entire school in minutes.
Dawadi, 47, is the principal and an English teacher at Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School in the Trishuli Valley. Speaking to NDTV, he recalled how the day started like any other. "It was a normal day. Classes started at 6.30, and I was there," he said.
At around 9.10 am, while he was teaching a class, a staff member rushed into the room with an urgent warning. "At ten past nine, one of my accountants shouted and said, 'The flood is coming, everything is flooding,'" Dawadi said.
Dawadi initially went to check things out himself. "I was inside the classroom, and I came into the basement," he said. Moments later, a colleague confirmed his worst fears. "Then one of my colleagues came near me and said, 'Sir, the flood is coming, and the whole village is swept upwards,'" he recalled. That colleague then rode off on a motorbike to warn others.
Around the same time, more warnings started coming in from colleagues and a school guard, who told Dawadi he wanted to take his own child to safety.
With around 900 of the school's 1,643 students present that morning, mostly older students aged 11 to 18, Dawadi had only seconds to decide what to do. "I immediately thought about it, and some of my colleagues came to me, and we decided to evacuate. If the information turned out to be wrong, we would only lose a single day's education. If it was right, we would be risking people's lives," he said.
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He chose to act. "We immediately sent the children to a safe place. If your home is safe, go home. But if your home is near the riverbank, go uphill instead," he said.
Dawadi rang the school bell and told teachers to get the children out of their classrooms straight away. He also tried calling the school bus drivers to turn them back, though one bus he could not reach had already crossed the bridge over the river.
Rather than running with the children himself, Dawadi stayed back to coordinate. "I first directed them, my colleagues ran with them, and I stayed back in the classrooms. I ordered my colleagues, the gatekeeper and the security guard to blow their whistles, and they did, sending the children on their way. Some children were panicking," he said.
"They were very scared, they were very panicked, they were crying, and some asked, 'Where are my parents, where are they?'" he said.
The children ran uphill to safety, with one girl taken up on a motorbike after suffering a panic attack. The rest of the pupils eventually sheltered under a bodhi tree as Dawadi followed behind them.
Soon after, the floodwaters tore through the area, sweeping away buildings, bridges and other structures, including the school itself. Asked what it felt like to look back and see the school gone, Dawadi said the moment overwhelmed him. "I felt a lot of pain. I was also a student of the same school. I went up with my students, running and running up the hill, and when I looked back, nothing was there," he said.
"Then I sat down, and I became very emotional. I couldn't do anything. I spent most of my life there, about 70 per cent of it," he added. Dawadi has taught at the school for the past 23 years, having once been a student there himself. "So everything was gone within 10 minutes," he said.
Despite losing the building, Dawadi said saving the students mattered more. "Yes, there's no building, but we saved lives. That's why I've come here to talk to the authorities. We've saved people's lives, but we also have to continue the education. Education is another important part," he said.
Asked whether he cried himself, Dawadi said he held back his emotions to keep the children calm. "No, I controlled my emotions. If I cried, no one would stop. So I cried elsewhere, watching everything swept away. I stayed there and started crying," he said. He added that returning to see the school's ruins the following day left him shaken all over again. "And yesterday I went there to see the wreckage of the school. That's when I became very panicked," he said.
The flash flood was triggered when a huge amount of ice and rock broke away from the Langtang Lirung peak near the Nepal-Tibet border, falling around 1,200 metres into the upper part of the Lhende Khola river. The resulting surge killed hundreds of people across Nepal and Tibet, with Nepal reporting over 900 deaths and more than 4,500 people still missing.
Two members of staff from the school were among those killed. Social history teacher Santos Pariyar, 32, was swept away after returning to his rented room near the river to cook breakfast, while school janitor Sultan Lama died after going back to the school to close its doors.
