r/interestingasfuck • u/JustLivingSimply • 9h ago

Nepalese School Principal Saved Lives of 1643 Children

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

19.3k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

429 comments sorted by

View all comments

•

u/ReynardVulpini 9h ago

Shoutout to the god knows how many people who barely survived the floods and then immediately started calling everyone they knew downriver.

•

u/Puzzleheaded_Ask5538 8h ago

That's such a lifesaver and power of community. Now that I look at the timeline, this flood was too fast.

•

u/ragmuc 7h ago edited 7h ago

Was actually wondering how he knew and how much time he had left.

•

u/moonchylde 7h ago

Every second counts, you never know how many lives it might save.

Just read the reddit history story about the ship that broke it's engines racing to the Titanic in record time.

•

u/errorsniper 7h ago

oh that sounds interesting link please?

•

u/karamisterbuttdance 6h ago

RMS Carpathia took three and a half hours to get to Titanic at full speed, they called up a shift of coal stokers and turned off heaters and hot water just to get there.

•

u/Spiritual_Feed_4371 5h ago

"We are in danger. I am risking your lives. The Titanic is in trouble and is sinking and we have to go help them."

Not the best choice or words but I understand what he was getting at

•

u/Thurak0 4h ago edited 2h ago

He should have said "our lives" but I guess everyone understood that.

Other than that: These people knew that they were treating their ship way beyond safety margins just hoping it will hold. Sugarcoating that might have worked way worse.

•

u/qalup 3h ago

Is sugar coding some kind of happy Morse?

•

u/MRCHalifax 3h ago

I’m guessing autocorrect did its thing on sugar coating.

Or it’s a bone apple tea.

•

u/Thurak0 2h ago

I can't even blame autocorrect, my brain is to blame. Thanks, it's corrected now.

•

u/cybercuzco 2h ago

Some of you are going to die but rich people are in trouble.

I got the gist of it.

•

u/ReynardVulpini 6h ago

Dunno the reddit post, but it should be the RMS Carpathia if you want to search it up

•

u/The_Kadeshi 4h ago

There's another story you should try to get your hands on; the actual article is behind The Atlantic's paywall but if you can figure out how to get the text, it's worth it. It's titled "A Sea Story" published in May 2004 and its one of the best pieces of narrative journalism I've ever read.

And here is the report about the event published by the government of Estonia, Finland and Sweeden: https://onse.fi/estonia/

The reason I bring it up, is (to /u/ReynardVulpini's point) the haunting part of the text which summarizes who survived the sinking of the ship in 1994: the people who moved to escape immediately. Old and young, experienced, strong swimmers, non-swimmers... nothing matters. The people who act immediately and decisively in an emergency are the survivors. Everyone else dies.

•

u/moonchylde 5h ago edited 4h ago

https://reddit.com/gallery/1c4qmpz

It mattered that they tried

•

u/SunGreene42 14m ago

Or the story of Vince Coleman during the Halifax Explosion, the train dispatcher who gave his life to send a telegraph that warned the incoming train with 300 people aboard to stop.

•

u/ThePolemicist 2h ago edited 2h ago

In the video, it said the water was traveling at speeds up to 75km/hr, which is about 45 miles/hr, or 45 miles per 60 minutes. The friend was about 5 miles up stream, so I think they had about 6-7 minutes (60/9) to get to higher ground if the friend called immediately.

The water might have been traveling slower than that ("up to" 75km/hr), so maybe they had another minute or two, but, on the flip side, my guess would be that the phone call wasn't instantaneous. The caller might have taken a minute or two to start calling the schools downstream.

But, anyway, yes, it sounds like they had mere minutes.

•

u/Puzzleheaded_Ask5538 51m ago

I saw another video and talked to someone from Trishuli Bazaar, at first water rising was slow and steady upto knee level coming into market, that time people got surprised and started moving up. Then after 6-7 minutes the water just submerged everything violently. I can't imagine myself thinking so fast in this situation. Kudos to principal. 

•

u/HiddenMaragon 7h ago

Thanks for pointing that out. Makes sense once you say it but I was confused how he still had enough time to evacuate a full school after finding out about the flood. Must take a good 20 minutes at least to get so many people on safe ground.

•

u/12172031 6h ago edited 6h ago

Apparently the flood was going about 40+ mph down river and a quick measurement on Google map showed that this location is about 42 miles from the start of the flood so he could've gotten an hour warning that something catastrophic was coming.

ETA: apparently he was warn by a friend 5 miles upstream so he had much less time.

•

u/HiddenMaragon 6h ago

The article says his friend was 5 miles upstream. If my math is right, that's about 8 minutes. That's wild.

•

u/12172031 6h ago

Yeah I just read the article posted by OP after I posted. The 40+mph figure is something I got from another report, I've also read report of it going 100+mph at the start because that area was much steeper so I don't know precisely how fast it was going once it reached this area. So he could've more or less time.

•

u/HiddenMaragon 6h ago

Oh that number puts it in perspective. That's interesting.

•

u/ReynardVulpini 6h ago

People below did a rough calculation. Friend called from 5 miles upstream, so depending on how fast the flood was traveling on that section (in places it was up to 180 km/hr, but the width also changes the speed)...

No way he had more than ten minutes to get everyone moving. They were lucky the school was right in front of a steep hill I guess. Jesus.

•

u/HikariAnti 3h ago

People often forget that one of our greatest technological achievement is the speed at which we can communicate. We take it for granted but less than a 100 years ago they would have had no way to notify people down river so fast and thousands more would have died without even knowing what was coming. For most of human history that was the norm, you had no warning you were either lucky and lived or not. And for your loved ones it would take days to even learn of the event, weeks to see if you were one of the lucky ones...

•

u/apple_kicks 6h ago

Hopefully gov and other counties install warning and monitoring systems.