Photo by Paul Cortez.

Metro is announcing its maintenance plan for rehabilitating the system on Friday morning, and it will include months of maintenance and service disruptions on every rail line, with the exception of new Silver Line tracks, according to reports from NBC 4 and WAMU.

“The hard truth is that 33 hours a week is not enough to dig out of the deferred maintenance hole, and at this rate, we will not reach an acceptable state of safety and reliability for several years,” General Manager Paul Wiedefeld wrote to the members of the board in a memo obtained by WAMU.

That maintenance hole has serious implications for riders. A report from the National Transportation Safety Board earlier this week blamed the deadly January 2015 smoke incident on “ineffective inspection and maintenance practices.”

While it doesn’t seem that Metro will have to shut down an entire line for six months, as Board Chair Jack Evans had suggested they might, the plans will still have a major impact on transit users.

From WAMU:

For days or, in some locations, weeks, segments of track—covering two to three stations at a time—will undergo either around-the-clock single-tracking or complete closures including during the work week, sources said. The work—described as surges—will take place along stretches of track both inside and outside the downtown core, which sources said are among the oldest in the system and in most need of urgent repair.

The work could begin in June at the earliest, according to WAMU, and will be spread out so that all of the lines are not affected at the same time.

“The region will need to come together to provide traffic mitigation and alternative travel options to help reduce the impact on customers and businesses,” Wiedefeld wrote in the memo. According to NBC 4 transportation reporter Adam Tuss, extra buses have already been called in to help during maintenance.

Wiedefeld has been working on what he deems a “holistic” plan that he told Congress will prevent the system from “lurching from crisis to crisis.” He will unveil the plan at 11 a.m. on Friday.

A very unscientific poll found that a whopping 75 percent of DCist readers who participated in the poll believed that Metro has “gotta do what you gotta do to make the system safe,” even if that meant shutting down an entire rail line for an extended period of time.