Rajendra Dadabi was 47 years old and was principal of Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School, in Nepal’s Trishuli Valley. That morning, a father from the village of Betrawati, upstream, warned him that the water was rising. It was 9:10.
Dadabi did not hesitate. He got the 900 children who were already in class out and ordered them to run uphill, away from the river. At the same time, he tried to contact the school bus drivers, each of whom was carrying up to 80 students.
He failed to alert one of them in time. The bus crossed the bridge over the Trishuli River minutes before the structure collapsed under the force of the floodwaters.
“The children were scared, but fear gave them the energy to run uphill”, Dadabi said later.
The school, a three-story building, was destroyed by the water. The students and their teachers spent two nights isolated, without roads or bridges, until the rescue teams arrived, some by helicopter.
There was no room for error. Ten minutes stood between a tragedy and a story worth telling.