Nepal flash flood: Meet Rajendra Dawadi, the teacher who evacuated over 1,600 children minutes before the river swallowed their school and the warnings that helped him make the life-saving decision

Under a tree on a hillside above the Trishuli valley, where more than sixteen hundred children studied, a school disappeared within minutes. Some were still in their uniforms. A few, reports say, were barefoot, having run out of their classrooms so fast there hadn’t been time for shoes. Below them, the building that had held them minutes earlier, a three-storey concrete structure, was gone, swallowed by a wall of mud, ice and river water that had, until that morning, been a mountain.

A phone call, a bell, and few minutes

The man everyone in Nuwakot is now calling a hero is Rajendra Dawadi, the 47-year-old principal of Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School. On the morning of August 26, 2026, at around 9.20 am, a friend of his called from Betrawati, a village roughly five miles upstream. The friend was panicking. He told Dawadi the village was gone, taken by the river, and told him to run.Then a parent walked in and told him the water was rising fast. Dawadi rang the school bell and told his teachers to clear the classrooms. About 900 children were already on the grounds. Another 700 were still travelling on foot or packed into school buses, each one carrying around 80 students. Dawadi got on the phone and reached every driver but one, turning the buses around before they ever reached the valley floor. Teachers walked the children uphill, away from the river, to gather under the tree that would become, for a few frightening hours, the school’s only safe address.Two staff members didn’t make that walk. Santos Pariyar, a 32-year-old social studies teacher, had gone back toward the river to his rented room. Sultan Lama, the school’s janitor, went back to shut the doors behind the evacuating children. Neither returned. Locals in the valley have called Dawadi a hero ever since, a word he brushes off almost irritably.“I decided I shouldn’t delay any more. Even if the flood was not coming, it was just a matter of a single day’s classes,” he told the BBC.

What actually hit the valley wasn’t a flood in the usual sense

Here’s where the story stops being about one school. What tore through the Trishuli valley that morning wasn’t rainfall runoff or a burst monsoon river. It was a chunk of Langtang Lirung, a peak of more than 7,000 metres on the Nepal-Tibet border, the 99th highest mountain in the world, sitting inside a region so thick with ice fields that locals call it the Valley of Glaciers. A section of mountainside gave way and took part of a glacier down with it, plunging roughly 1,200 metres into the gorge of the Lhende Khola river below. As it fell, the debris picked up water, rock and loose sediment, turning into a fast-moving, ballooning mass that raced downstream and eventually touched rivers more than 100 kilometres away, according to Reuters and the BBC.It happened fast enough, and with enough force, that seismometers over a hundred kilometres away registered it. The US Geological Survey initially logged the event as a 4.4-magnitude earthquake before revising that to reflect what scientists now believe was actually a landslide, one violent enough to register 5.2 on local instruments.

Why a mountain that’s stood for several years suddenly let go

Scientists studying the site believe the peak’s undoing was a slow one, decades in the making rather than a single freak accident. Glaciologists describe what likely happened as a cirque glacier collapse, ice sitting in a bowl-shaped mountain basin that had been cemented in place by frozen ground acting almost like glue. As that region warms, and the Himalayas are warming considerably faster than most of the planet, permafrost that has held mountainsides together for centuries begins to thaw. The slope loses its grip. Researchers are still confirming exactly which combination of factors triggered this specific collapse, and are cautious about pinning it solely on climate change. But they’re not calling it a one-off, either. This same valley saw a glacial lake outburst flood in 2025 and an ice-and-rock avalanche elsewhere in the region in 2024. Indigenous communities living beneath Langtang Lirung have reportedly warned climbers for generations that the mountain is an “angry” one, and that it proves them right most years.The UN’s climate science body has said that shrinking glaciers, snow and permafrost are already destabilising mountain regions around the world, and that events like this one are expected to happen more often as temperatures keep climbing. In the days after the collapse, a new lake that had formed behind the landslide debris began overflowing on its own, triggering fresh evacuation warnings in communities already reeling.For now, in Nuwakot, 1,643 children go home to their families because one man decided a warning was worth acting on before he had time to be sure. He still doesn’t think he did anything unusual. Everyone else in that valley disagrees.