An extraordinary act of courage has emerged from the tragedy that has engulfed Nepal. An educator managed to lead 1,643 students to safety as a powerful flood swept through the Trishuli River valley.
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Wednesday morning had begun normally at Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School. Around 900 children were inside the three-story building, while hundreds more were still on their way, arriving by bus or on foot. It was 9:20 a.m.
Suddenly, the school principal received a shocking message from an acquaintance in Betrawati, a settlement eight kilometers farther up the valley.
“The village has been flooded. Leave immediately.”
Rajendra Dawadi, 47, an English teacher, initially assessed the risk carefully. The concrete school had been built nearly 60 meters above the riverbed, a height that appeared sufficient.
But a few minutes later, a parent arrived with an even more serious warning: the water was surging at a frightening speed. Dawadi no longer hesitated. He rang the school bell, but this time it did not signal the start of classes—it marked the beginning of an emergency evacuation.
The teaching staff responded without delay, getting the children out of the building and directing them toward higher ground. At the same time, Dawadi remembered the three vehicles that were still bringing groups of students, each carrying around 80 children. He called the drivers one by one. He managed to alert all of them except one.
The instruction was clear: turn back immediately. At that very moment, he spotted the bus he had been unable to reach by phone crossing the bridge.
The muddy waters had reached the schoolyard. Dawadi frantically signaled to the driver to turn back without delay. The vehicle managed to reach the safe bank. Seconds later, the bridge structure collapsed under the force of the torrents.
Escape to the hills
As the students began to understand the scale of the threat, panic erupted uncontrollably. One girl suffered a panic attack and had to be taken by motorcycle to higher ground. The rest of the children continued on foot, with Dawadi walking at the back to make sure no one was left behind.
Eventually, the group took shelter in a safe place near a bodhi tree. Below them, the destructive force of the water was swallowing the school building and transforming the landscape within moments. All 1,643 enrolled students had been saved. Unfortunately, not everyone survived the disaster.
Santos Pariyar, 32, who taught social history, was swept away after returning to his rented room beside the river. The maintenance worker, Sultan Lama, is also reported to have died after going back to close the school doors.
When local residents later called Dawadi a hero, his response was extremely modest:
“What else could I have done?”
According to preliminary scientific analyses, the cause of this catastrophe of such immense proportions was the collapse of a gigantic mass of ice and rock from the Langtang Lirung region of the Himalayas, near the border area between Nepal and Tibet. The mass fell around 1,200 meters into the deep gorge of the Lhende Khola River.
The impact became a colossal mass of water, mud, rocks and debris that moved at terrifying speed toward the valleys below.
Satellite imagery studied afterward revealed that it was not only ice that had fallen, but also part of the solid bedrock beneath the glacier.
The flood completely destroyed settlements, bridges, roads and energy infrastructure, altering the course of rivers for dozens of kilometers.
The tragedy affected both sides of the Nepal-Tibet border, leaving hundreds dead and thousands missing. Search and rescue efforts are still continuing.
The climate change factor
Experts are cautious about directly linking a single geological event to the climate crisis. However, accelerated warming in the Himalayas is creating increasingly unstable conditions.
The melting of glaciers and permafrost can undermine the stability of mountain slopes, increasing the likelihood of landslides, glacial collapses and powerful sudden floods.
Across the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region, the rate of glacier retreat has increased significantly since the beginning of this century.
Thus, the tragedy in Trishuli takes on a deeper meaning. It is not merely a disaster in an isolated valley of Nepal, but stands as a stark warning of the rapid transformations taking place in Himalayan ecosystems and the unpredictable risks facing communities living at the foot of glaciers.
