Nepal floods: Teacher rang the bell, 1,643 children escaped. Minutes later, school was swept away

Dubai: When Rajendra Dawadi heard that a wall of water was racing towards his school, he rang the bell and ordered 1,643 children to run for higher ground.

Minutes later, the flood tore through the valley, destroying buildings, bridges and the school itself.

Every one of the children survived.

Days later, rescuers searching through rubble in another devastated Nepalese village thought they heard a cat. Instead, buried beneath the debris, they found five-year-old Manisha alive.

The extraordinary stories of survival have offered rare moments of hope five days after catastrophic flash floods and landslides devastated the Nepal-Tibet border, leaving at least 788 people dead and 3,048 missing as rescuers continued a desperate search on Sunday.

Dawadi, 47, principal and an English teacher at Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School in Nepal’s Nuwakot district, was at school on Wednesday morning when a friend called to warn him that a nearby village had been swept away.

Initially, he thought the three-storey concrete school, about 60 metres above the river, was safe. Then a parent arrived saying the water was rising rapidly.

Dawadi immediately rang the school bell, ordered teachers to evacuate classrooms and told school bus drivers to turn back.

The children scrambled towards higher ground, eventually sheltering under a bodhi tree.

Soon afterwards, mud, rocks, ice and debris swept through the area and destroyed the school. All 1,643 students survived, although two staff members were killed.

Sixteen-year-old Yunisha said she and her friends escaped by just 10 seconds.

“Within no time, the bazaar was swept away in front of my eyes,” she told the BBC.

In Rasuwa district, another rescue was unfolding.

Teams searching near Syabrubesi on Friday heard what they initially thought was a cat trapped be-neath rubble. As they removed the debris, they discovered five-year-old Manisha.

It took around two hours to free her.

She was alive but barely responsive, and bad weather initially prevented a helicopter evacuation. Rescuers gave her water and boiled rice water until she regained consciousness.

Manisha was eventually taken to hospital in Kathmandu, where she was reunited with her parents and was reported to be in stable condition.

But for thousands of other families, the wait continues.

AFP reported Sunday that 3,048 people remained missing across Nepal and Tibet.

Hundreds of foreigners, including trekkers and pilgrims travelling to Mount Kailash, are among those unaccounted for.

Rescuers are also racing to reach hydropower workers feared trapped underground.

Nepal’s disaster authority lists 933 hydropower workers among the missing. At the Trishuli 3A hydroelectric project, army troops and engineers have drilled through debris and inserted a pipe into a blocked tunnel.

“They have started sending air through the small opening,” Nepal’s Home Minister Sudan Gurung said.

Overnight rain and rising rivers have complicated rescue operations, while across the border Chinese teams were temporarily moved from the hardest-hit area after a new lake formed following a landslide.

Scientists say the disaster began when part of a glacier on the southern slope of Langtang Lirung frac-tured, triggering an enormous ice-rock avalanche and debris flow that travelled more than 20 kilometres towards the border.

For families still searching for loved ones, however, the science offers little comfort.

“All the settlements near the river were swept away,” Nuwakot resident Buddhi Ram Dangol told AFP.

“There is nothing left.”

Yet amid the devastation, the survival of Manisha and the 1,643 schoolchildren has given rescuers something increasingly precious five days into the disaster: Hope that others may still be found alive.