Headmaster Rajendra Dawadi was in his school in Nepal’s Bidur last Wednesday when his accountant entered, shouting: “The flood is coming, the flood is coming!”, giving an early warning that helped save the lives of 900 students and 16 faculty members.

As teachers at the Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School began receiving panicked phone calls from relatives and friends, a roaring wave of mud water was already making its way through the valley upstream, flattening entire towns.

The accountant had received a call from a relative in Rasuwa, which was hit first, giving just 14 minutes to evacuate in a decision that ⁠saved the students’ and teachers’ lives — a rare glimmer of hope in a natural disaster that has killed over 900 people, with thousands missing.

Rebuilt in the wake of Nepal’s devastating 2015 earthquake that killed around 9,000 people, the school stood on a peninsula of sorts, squeezed in between the Trishuli river and a hydropower canal.

“We immediately said: Stop the class, ring the bell,” Dawadi told Reuters in an interview.

The school no longer exists and its former location sits inside the riverbed.

A panicked escape

Over 900 of the school’s roughly 1,600 students were on campus at the time of the first warning.

Dawadi said he instructed buses that were headed to the school with more students to head to safer ground, and quickly began to evacuate the premises. As chaos spread, at least one student ⁠fainted, Dawadi said.

Parents, teachers, and students arrived with motorbikes to pick up their children. Others were brought to safety in buses or ran to higher ground.

By the time the last bus crossed a nearby bridge across the river an estimated 14 minutes later, a wall of water was making its way through the town of 60,000.

As “our bus crossed the new bridge, the old bridge collapsed,” Dawadi said.

Headmaster Dawadi was once a ⁠student in this school, long before he became its headmaster, and he now wants authorities to rebuild the school in a safe location as soon as possible.

‘Only god can do this’

Headmaster Dawadi is being credited by many parents for saving their children. “He was like a God. He gave life ⁠to my daughter and to many other children. Only God can do this,” said Man Maya Tamang, 50, who initially thought she had lost her daughter Sushmita.

For many others in Bidur, the warnings came too late. At least one school staffer and the ⁠school accountant’s mother are missing, Dawadi said.

After warning the school, the accountant had rushed back to his parents’ house to save them. He managed to take his father uphill, Dawadi said, but when he returned for his mother the house had been washed away.