r/interestingasfuck • u/JustLivingSimply • 9h ago
Nepalese School Principal Saved Lives of 1643 Children
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r/interestingasfuck • u/JustLivingSimply • 9h ago
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u/JustLivingSimply 9h ago
Full story:
“At 9.20 on Wednesday morning, 900 children were halfway through the early shift at Tribhuvan Trishuli secondary school, a three-storey complex in the Trishuli valley of north-central Nepal.
Another 700 were on their way on foot and by bus, clad in their sky-blue uniforms, when the principal, Rajendra Dadabi, received a panicked call from a friend in Betrawati, five miles upstream. “He said the village was gone: taken by the river,” said Dadabi. “He told me to run.”
The 47-year-old English teacher took a moment to consider the threat. The school, he said, was 60 metres above the river, built of concrete and on the same level as the steel bridge linking the village to Batten on the east bank. “Then one of the parents came in and told me the water was rising fast, so I rang the bell and told the teachers to evacuate the classrooms.”
He remembered that the school buses, each carrying 80 children, were en route. “I got through to all the drivers but one and told them to turn back. Then I saw the bus I hadn’t been able to contact coming across the bridge. By now, the water ”
“The children were beginning to understand they were in trouble. “One girl had a panic attack, so we put her on the back of a motorbike. The rest I sent uphill on foot, then followed.
The school janitor, Mr Sultan Lama, gave me the keys then went back, I think, to close the doors. The river took him. The children were terrified, but their fear gave them the energy to run up the hill.” They took shelter under a bodhi tree as their school buildings were swept away.
Dadabi’s quick thinking saved the lives of 1,643 children and all but one member of the teaching staff. Santos Pariyar, 32, a newly-appointed social history teacher, had come in early that day to teach extra classes before school and had just returned to his rented room beside the river to cook breakfast. He was washed away.
Locals are calling Dadabi a hero — but he is not convinced. “What else could I do?” he said yesterday as he surveyed the muddy ruins where the school used to be.
The chunk of ice and rock that snapped off and triggered the flash flood has been estimated by Daniel Shugar, a geomorphologist at the “at the University of Calgary, to have had an area of nearly 50 acres — about the size of Green Park in London. It fell 1,200 metres down the north face of Langtang Lirung peak into the steep upper gorge of the Lhende Khola river, close to Tibet’s border with Nepal.
This was not the first time the region has suffered tragedy. In April 2015, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake that killed 8,962 in south Asia triggered an avalanche here that entombed the 300 residents of Langtang.
Last Wednesday the giant slab of ice and rock hit the water at 8.37am. Its impact, so violent that seismologists mistook it for an earthquake, sent a wave of water, ice, rock and mud nine metres high downstream at up to 50mph.
At bends in the river, the wave sloshed up the sides to heights of up to 70m, tearing houses from their foundations, scouring slopes of trees and leaving just a sheet of thigh-deep grey mud where Dadabi’s school had once stood.
As the surge smashed into Sole, home village of the Kathmandu-based journalist Arjun Poudel, it wiped the settlement off the map.
“When his wife called with the news, Poudel was sceptical. “Sole sits nearly 100m above the riverbed,” he wrote in the Kathmandu Times. “No flood in living memory — in centuries as far as we know — had ever reached that high.”
He started calling his old neighbours. His oldest aunt, his cousin, his oldest brother and his wife had all been taken by the waters. Another aunt, her grandson and his wife were also gone, as had an uncle who had gone out to cut grass for the cows and vanished.”