Update: The event was cancelled late Friday morning, according to organizers, due to incoming extreme weather that is forecast to hit the region this weekend.

They says there is no new set date for the swim at this time, however  it would likely be sometime in late spring of 2024.

Original: This Saturday, for the first time in more than 50 years, D.C. residents will have a chance to take a dip in the Anacostia River. For just about everyone, it will be their first time swimming in the river — after all, there has been a swim ban in place since the early 1970s.

But it won’t be Dennis Chestnut’s first time in the river.

“My first time jumping into the Anacostia was actually a result of a challenge by the bigger kids. They said, jump in,” Chestnut recalls. “I jumped in, and here I am to prove that I made it to the side.”

This was in the 1950s, a time when D.C.’s public pools were segregated. In Chestnut’s neighborhood in Ward 7, east of the river, he says there were no pools at all that Black people could use. Even when pools officially desegregated, Black swimmers weren’t always welcome.

“The access may have been made available, but a lot of the mindsets of people had not changed. You know, you could change the law on the books, but the behaviors, they kind of changed over time.”

Chestnut has fond memories of playing in the river, and says it made him a strong swimmer.

“We would be having so much fun just being in the water. If you can imagine, we would forget that we were actually right in the thick part of the city’s landfill.”

The muddy beach where Chestnut and his friends learned to swim was right on the edge of the municipal dump, where there were regular open-air trash fires — just one of many ways the Anacostia River and the neighborhoods around it were used as the city’s dumping grounds.

The river has been highly polluted for decades, once known as one of the most polluted urban waterways in America. In 1971, the city government — then federally controlled — banned swimming in all District waterways. At the time one appointed council member called the state of the rivers “our single most dismal environmental failure.”

Rather than fixing the pollution problem in the rivers, the city told people to stay out.

The river’s water quality has been improving steadily over the past thirty years or so, thanks to concerted cleanup efforts — from planting trees and wetlands along the shores, to reintroducing freshwater mussels. In 2018, the first segment of a new Anacostia tunnel system went online, leading to a big drop in bacteria levels in the river.

A free, one-day swim event, called Splash, was originally scheduled for July at Kingman Island. It had to be cancelled after heavy rain and sewer work caused an overflow of 2 million gallons of untreated sewage and stormwater.

Since then, another major piece of sewer infrastructure went online — the final segment of a tunnel system that will cut sewer overflows into the Anacostia by 98%.

In weekly testing this summer and last, the water at Kingman Island has been clean enough to swim in about 90 percent of the time, per EPA water quality standards.

It is still illegal to swim in DC’s rivers, despite the improving water quality. The District issued a permit for the free, one day Splash event, which is being put on by the nonprofit Anacostia Riverkeeper.

Riverkeeper Trey Sherard says they picked this spot at Kingman Island because of the high water quality, and also because it’s easily accessible from the east side of the river.

“It’s making sure that people who have been living on the river for generations, especially people of color, people who have been putting up with the environmental racism in this area for a long time, have a lot more direct access to this event than they would if we had it farther downriver.”

Sherard admits swimming in the Anacostia isn’t an easy sell for a lot of people who grew up hearing how dirty the river is.

“There were a whole lot of “hell no, nevers” in the comments — the comments have been a little rough, and we expected that. At the same time, over 100 tickets for the event on Eventbrite sold out in way under a half an hour,” Sherard says.

There are a lot of reasons people may be resistant to — or even appalled by — the idea of swimming in the Anacostia. One is the river’s color: brown.

“Brown is good,” Sherard says. “This river has always been, is and always should be brown.”

The entire Anacostia watershed is in the flat coastal plain region — unlike the Potomac, whose watershed extents through the hilly piedmont region of Maryland and Virginia, and into the Appalachian mountains.

The Anacostia is a slow-moving river that sloshes back and forth with the tides. That gives the water lots of time to steep in the leaf litter from the deciduous forests in the region.

“The same way you would steep tea with a bag of tea leaves, right — the tea turns brown from the tannins and other compounds in those leaves. The very same thing happens to this river,” Sherard says.

While the brown color is healthy, Sherard says, it shouldn’t be cloudy or muddy.

For generations, D.C. residents have said the Anacostia River is dirty and dangerous — stay away. Sherard says many are not aware of the decades of restoration work that’s lead up to this swim day.

“A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, well, out of the blue, they’re just going to jump into the river.’ That’s not the case.”

The Anacostia has weathered several waves of pollution, starting in the 1600s – when forests were clearcut to make way for tobacco — Prince George’s County was for a time the biggest tobacco producer in the British Empire. Centuries later, when D.C.’s first sewers were built, the system was designed to dump directly into the river — a problem that continued to impair the river’s health up until very recently.

Things started to change in the late 1990s and early 2000s, says Christopher Williams is president and CEO of the Anacostia Watershed Society. Back then, the city’s antiquated pipes still spilled more than 2 billion gallons of sewage into the Anacostia each year.

“My organization and a lot of others, we consistently talked to DC Water and to the EPA and to the city government telling them this is bad, we’ve got to do something about this,” Williams says.

Talking didn’t get them very far, so in 2000, Anacostia Watershed Society and a coalition of other groups filed a lawsuit against DC Water. In a settlement, the sewer authority agreed in a consent decree to fix the problem by building a massive new tunnel system. The 23-ft.-diameter tunnels capture sewer overflow, rather than letting it dump into the rivers, and transport it to DC Water’s Blue Plains treatment facility. Tunnels to keep sewage out of the Potomac River and Rock Creek are still in planning phases, and must be finished by 2030, under the terms of the consent decree.

While the much larger Potomac River is generally cleaner than the Anacostia, swimming there is complicated by fast-moving currents, and federal ownership of much of the shoreline. Rock Creek, though it receives less sewage, is much smaller and may never be clean enough to swim in safely.

On the Anacostia, Williams says the data already show a dramatic improvement in water quality over the past three decades that the Anacostia Watershed has been keeping track.

“We’ve also got the eye test that backs that up because you’re just seeing it in the river. You’re seeing animals like beavers and otters that are very sensitive to water quality, returning to the watershed after they’d virtually disappeared for a long time.”

There’s still lots of work left to do, before the river is fully restored — safe to swim in any day of the year and clean enough to eat the fish. There is an ongoing project to clean up toxic sediment on the river bottom, left over from decades of industrial and military activity. And there are still stubbornly high levels of bacteria in some places, the source of which is unclear — it’s likely coming from a combination of wildlife and pet poop, as well as suburban storm drains that wash pollution off the roads and sidewalks directly into waterways.

Meanwhile, the District government is working toward lifting the swim ban in the next few years.

Gretchen Mikeska, Anacostia coordinator at the District Department of Energy and Environment, says legalizing swimming in the rivers isn’t as simple as it sounds — it’s a regulatory process that has to go through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“The bar is pretty high. If we never had the ban in place, it would be easier, but we have had this ban in place for a long time, and now to lift the ban takes some work,” Mikeska says.

DOEE is working on an interim plan to expand swimming access on the rivers, where one or two sites will be designated as pilot swim locations. Mikeska says that will likely start in the summer of 2025.

The weather for Saturday’s swim event doesn’t look great. But Dennis Chestnut, who learned to swim in the river, still plans to get in the water. He knows there are a lot of doubters out there, and he wants to prove them wrong.

“People have been telling me to put on a wetsuit and all kinds of stuff. I’m not doing that. I want to feel the river on my body. I’m ready to go in.”