Rajendra Dawadi, headteacher of Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School in Nepal’s Nuwakot district, halted classes and moved 900 students to higher ground after receiving repeated flood warnings. Within minutes, a powerful flood surge struck the town. Dawadi said a further 10-minute delay could have left neither the students nor staff alive.

The school has 1,600 students, and Dawadi received four warnings within minutes, including one from the upstream town of Betrawati. As the evacuation began, he saw a residential building about 100 metres from the river disappear in the floodwaters. Sixteen-year-old student Unisha said she and her friends survived by about 10 seconds as they ran along muddy paths while water and debris engulfed the town.

Teachers in other Nepalese areas also evacuated children at the last moment. At least 69 schools were damaged or destroyed, affecting about 19,000 children, Save the Children said. Authorities reported more than 3,700 rescues, 781 deaths and 2,502 people still unreachable, including 592 foreign nationals. USGS said the disaster began Wednesday after a glacier collapse in the Himalayan region near the Nepal-Tibet border.