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3:58Now PlayingA life-saving bell ring: Amid Nepal floods, headmaster's warning saved 1,500 students
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September 1, 2026
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3:58Now PlayingHeadmaster Rajendra Dawadi was in the building when he could hear his accountant shouting: "The flood is coming, the flood is coming!"
As he told USA TODAY partner Reuters, Dawadi and his colleagues realized they may only have minutes to save the lives of hundreds of students as flood waters heading for them. The secondary school, built in the wake of Nepal's devastating 2015 earthquake that killed nearly 9,000 people, was constructed on a peninsula of sorts and squeezed in between the Trishuli river and a hydropower canal. In short, it was right in the middle of the flood wave's imminent path of destruction.
"We immediately stopped the classes and rang the bell," Dawadi told Reuters."
The decision saved the lives of more than 1,500 students and around 60 faculty members, according to Dawadi and other teachers at the school -- a rare glimmer of hope in a natural disaster that killed over 700 people, with more than 3,000 people still missing.
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