The Anacostia River is one step closer to its long-awaited glow-up.

D.C. announced the next steps in a years-long plan to clean the river — one of the most polluted waterways in the region, and one of the county’s most trash-impaired rivers. 77 underwater acres of contamination “hot spots,” including the Anacostia River, Kingman Lake, and Washington Channel will be cleaned over the next few years — with the goal of making the Anacostia River fishable and swimmable in the next five years.

Director of D.C. Department of Energy and Environment, Tommy Wells, outlined the findings and next action items of the Anacostia River Sediment Project, a multiphase initiative to identify and decrease contamination that has settled at the bottom of the once-industrial waterway.

“Now it’s time to get to work to pull this sediment out that’s contaminated so that our fish can be healthier, we can eat the fish, and we can swim in the rivers again,” Wells said at Kingman Island on Friday. (He was joined by a large, standing fish to celebrate the milestone development.)

According to Wells, the work should begin across the three locations between 2022 and 2023. The city will spend $35 million removing sediment and burying it, trapping the harmful pollutants that make the water and river bottom dangerous for fish and swimmers.

While many D.C. waterways are polluted with random trash, they’re also full of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs — carcinogenic chemicals found in several different forms of plastic. The Anacostia River in particular has a concerning micro-plastics problem, and these tiny particles are often full of PCBs. According to DOEE, the 77-acre clean-up should reduce the risk posed by PCBs to humans by nearly 90%.

The Anacostia River Sediment Project — an effort launched in 2013 by the DOEE — sought to investigate, identify, and eventually reduce the levels of contaminants like PCBs in the region’s water. This week’s announcement of action items marks the project’s Interim Record of Decision — a lengthly report of studies and plans accumulated over the past several years of research.

“We’re five or six years into the advocacy that got this ball rolling,” says Trey Sherard, the interim Anacostia Riverkeeper. “We’re probably five years of actual research, not just literature research but actual field research dedicated to this specific project. I’ve seen the conversation spin 180 degrees from all the doom and gloom to all of these what-ifs and plans, and now these plans are coming into fruition and we’re seeing them in practice.”

Sherard noted the improvements made to river health in recent years by D.C. Water’s Anacostia River Tunnel Project — a series of ongoing tunnel projects designed to limit the flow of sewage and storm water into the river. While the tunnels may not impact the levels of PCBs in the Anacostia, Sherard notes that limiting sewage overflow improves river health by decreasing amounts of bacteria that can cause gastrointestinal illnesses.

The interim report released this week outlines the first set of plans for the region’s polluted “hot spots,” and Sherard says it’s only the beginning.

“These are only the hottest hot spots, and that is something that we at Riverkeeper are going to keep pressing on the District about. We don’t expect these early action areas to the be the whole game, we do not expect this interim record of decision to be all that is needed for the clean-up to get us where we need to be for a fishable Anacostia River.”