People look on at the flood-ravaged Betrawati

From Onlinekhabar English

People look on at the flood-ravaged Betrawati. At 9:10 a.m. on August 26, head teacher Rajendra Dawadi received frantic phone calls about a flood heading downstream toward Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School. He ordered his roughly 900 students to run for higher ground. Ten minutes later, the flood hit the evacuated school. When flood waters receded, the whole compound was buried under debris, with only a fragment of the school’s roofline left showing. There were two “systems” that warned people about the impending danger that day: one built by the state relying on sensors and SMS messages, the other relying on community-based ties. Only the second worked reliably, and in the case of Dawadi and many other survivors, it even arrived first. But not everyone was as lucky. According to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA), as of September 3, a total of 1,252 people have died, with 4,216 more missing and roughly 1.6 million people affected across five districts in Nepal.