A headteacher in Nepal evacuated 900 children from a school moments before a deadly wall of water struck their town amid devastating flash floods that have killed almost 800 people and left thousands missing. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
Rajendra Dawadi, headteacher at Tribhuvan Trishuli secondary school in Nuwakot, which has 1,600 pupils, decided to halt classes and order children to higher ground after receiving warnings about the scale of the flooding heading their way. He said he had received four warnings from different people within minutes, including one from Betrawati, a town directly upstream.
Dawadi said during the evacuation he saw a hostel building about 100 metres from the river being engulfed by the torrent of flood water. "If we had made the decision 10 minutes later, all of us, including the students and me, would not be able to speak to you today," he told the BBC.
One student, 16-year-old Yunisha, told reporters that she and her friends survived by just 10 seconds. She described the children running up a muddy path to escape as water and debris inundated the town. "Within no time, the bazaar was swept away in front of my eyes," she said. She was reunited with her family three days later.
At least 69 schools have been destroyed or damaged by the floods, affecting nearly 19,000 children, according to the charity Save the Children. In Dhading, one of the areas worst hit, a group of schoolchildren survived when they left their classroom for their lunch break. Others escaped when teachers told them to quickly evacuate classrooms just before the waters came crashing in.
The mother of one child told the Associated Press that teachers had warned students: "There is a flood and you should leave bags and tiffins. That's how they managed to survive."
More than 3,700 people have been rescued in Nepal so far. The country said on Sunday 2,502 people, including 592 foreigners, were out of contact. It reported an updated death toll of 781 people.
The disaster, which struck the Nepal-Tibet border region of the Himalayas on Wednesday morning, was caused by a glacial collapse that sent a wall of water and debris cascading downstream, the US Geological Survey said. Nepal's foreign minister has called for a global response to the climate crisis, saying the Nepali people had disproportionately become "major victims of climate change" despite having contributed a fraction of the planet's fossil fuel emissions.