Saturday, March 4th, 1989
We have many votes and arguments over many issues in the Wizengamot, and I know that as Chief Warlock they should all have the same weight to me, but today there was only one that I really cared about. According to the reports from the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes' Office of Safety and the follow-up report from the Unspeakables the last strands of magic from the accident on Platform 9 ¾ have finally faded enough that the Platform could be reset for use again. Who would have thought it would take over five years to clean up, back when it happened at the start of the 1984 term?
I could remember the report as if it were yesterday, even without today's recap of the situation: two witches apparated into the exact same space simultaneously, which should not have been possible, except that the witch side-along apparating her soon-to-be-first-year son had splinched herself in the process. The place where they appeared happened to be right in between two hot-headed parents dueling right as station security attempted to stun the duelers, resulting in them taking the full blunt of the spell barrage. Even with the son's accidental magic flaring up in belated defense this probably would have been only days of clean up if the combination of spells had not acted as an amplifier. (Peter Edgecombe's treatise on how that all worked is fascinating, as are the power amplification spells that have come from it, temporary and not yet fully reliable though they may be.) The biggest problem for clean up still was not that, though, but the large number of accidental magic flare-ups that this first spell mess caused from underage siblings, new first years, most of the second years, a number of the third years, and according to the reports even some of the fourth years and two of the fifth years.
The Hogwarts Express itself escaped damage, but it has had to leave from other platforms and disrupt other wizarding train schedules since. The vote to official reopen the platform for the Easter Holidays was more a perfunctory one that a question of actual debate, but it makes me extremely pleased. If I never have to deal with the King's Cross Wizarding Station Master in official capacity ever again, it will be too soon—he could give Aberforth competition in glares and guilt trips.
