Quick evacuation saves 900 pupils in Nepal minutes before flood destroys school

Urgent warnings from upstream

Around 09:10 on Wednesday, 26 August 2026, phone alerts reached Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School in the town of Bidur, located in Nepal's Nuwakot district north of Kathmandu. A school accountant and staff members received frantic calls from relatives in Rasuwa and settlements situated eight kilometres upstream along the Trishuli River, reporting that a massive wave of mud and water was leveling entire villages. Almost simultaneously, an anxious parent rushed into the building to pull her daughter out of class. Although municipal authorities had issued no official flood alarm, 47-year-old headmaster Rajendra Dawadi stopped instruction immediately and initiated a full evacuation.

I decided to delay no longer. Even if the flood did not happen, it was only one day of classes.

Evacuation under time pressure

Roughly 900 of the 1,643 students enrolled at the secondary school were already in classrooms when the alarm sounded, primarily pupils aged 11 to 18. Younger cohorts had avoided the initial danger because their classes were scheduled to commence at 10:00. Dawadi ordered the school bell rung and sent staff to guide pupils up steep paths behind the school. When panicking children rushed toward the hillside, at least one student fainted and was carried up the slope on a teacher's motorcycle. Dawadi contacted school bus drivers by phone, instructing them to halt in safe zones. One arriving bus full of children was ordered to reverse over a newly constructed bridge, which cleared the crossing moments before an adjacent older bridge collapsed into the river.

My friends and I survived by ten seconds.

Destruction of the school campus

At approximately 09:23, roughly 13 minutes after the first phone call, the debris wave slammed into the Trishuli Bazaar area. The three-storey concrete school building, situated on a peninsula between the Trishuli River and a hydroelectric canal, was swept into the riverbed within seconds. From high ground a few hundred metres up the mountain, students and staff watched the local market and school boarding facilities disappear under mud and water. While all 900 pupils and 16 faculty members on campus reached safety, at least two school workers, including the accountant's mother, remained missing. The surviving students and teachers remained isolated on the hillside for two days due to obliterated roads until rescue helicopters airlifted them to safety.

Broader devastation across Himalayan valleys

The flood was triggered on 26 August by the collapse of a glacier upstream, sending flash floods through river valleys across central Nepal and into parts of Tibet. The disaster severed transportation corridors, wrecked bridges, destroyed residential quarters, and flooded hydroelectric tunnels where workers became trapped. In downstream locations such as Bharatpur, hundreds of recovered bodies exceeded local morgue capacities. By Monday, 31 August 2026, the nationwide casualty count reached 903 dead and 4,247 people missing. Dawadi, an English teacher and former student of the demolished school, called on national authorities to reconstruct the institution on safer ground.