'We survived by 10 seconds': Nepal principal evacuates 900 before flood swallows school

A school principal in Nepal saved 900 lives by evacuating students to higher ground moments before a glacial flood engulfed the campus.

According to the BBC and The Guardian, Rajendra Dawadi, principal of Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School in Nuwakot district, received four phone calls around 9:10 a.m. on Wednesday warning that upstream villages were being swept away by floodwaters.

Dawadi immediately halted classes and ordered students to run to higher ground. School buses that had not yet arrived were turned back.

"Even if the flood had not come, we would have only missed one day of school," Dawadi said, recalling the decision.

He said a parent then rushed to the school saying, "A big flood is coming — I came to get my daughter." "Parents do not come running for no reason," he said. "I was convinced we could not afford to wait even one second."

The flood soon crashed into the school, submerging the dormitory building almost instantly. "If I had decided 10 minutes later, none of us — including the students and myself — would be here talking on Monday," Dawadi said. Little of the school building remains.

Yunisha Amatya, 16, told the BBC she and her friends "survived by 10 seconds." She said she had been studying in a classroom until just before the floodwaters arrived.

In Dhading district, students who had left their classrooms for lunch escaped harm. Others survived after teachers urgently ordered them out of the building. One student's mother told the Associated Press that teachers shouted, "The flood is coming — leave your bags and dosirak behind."

Save the Children said 69 schools were destroyed or damaged in the floods, with nearly 19,000 children affected.

Nepal's National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority put the death toll at 781 and the number of missing at 2,502 as of Sunday. The missing include 592 foreign nationals and 933 workers at hydropower construction sites along the rivers.

The disaster began Wednesday morning when a section of glacier collapsed along the Nepal-Tibet border in the Himalayas. The US Geological Survey said the collapse triggered a landslide that sent water and debris cascading downhill. The force of the collapse registered on seismographs worldwide as the equivalent of a magnitude-5.2 earthquake.

Nepal's Foreign Minister Sishir Khanal said the country's people had become "the primary victims of climate change" despite Nepal contributing only a negligible share of global fossil fuel emissions.

Nepal has lost roughly one-third of its glaciers over the past 30 years. The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development and the UN Development Programme have classified 47 of the 3,624 glacial lakes in Nepal, India and Tibet as being at risk of collapse, including 21 in Nepal.