(inspiring, reflective music).

NARRATOR: The sparkling path of the Anacostia River is home to over 40 species of fish, and more than 200 species of birds.

Nearly one million people live within its 176 square mile watershed.

The river begins in Maryland, and flows through Washington, D.C., where it meets "The Nation's River," the mighty Potomac.

The Anacostia has always been important ecologically, as a place where fish and fowl thrived, and economically, as the place where Americans built a capital city.

But after centuries of neglect, it became known as the "Forgotten River."

Now, it is considered one of the most polluted rivers in the nation.

Trash and raw sewage spew into the waterway, and the once-busy shipping channel is choked by silt and industrial toxins.

Today, biologists, researchers, volunteers, environmental groups and community activists are working to make the Anacostia swimmable and fishable once more.

They are joined in a common cause to revive the "Forgotten River."

As the Anacostia River flows through Washington, D.C., it passes Capitol Hill to the west.

The east bank of the river hugs the predominantly Black neighborhood of Anacostia, home of Dennis Chestnut, who is working to restore the local waterway.

(music fades out).

(ambient sounds of water gurgling).

DENNIS CHESTNUT: Growing up here in, in far northeast Ward seven, uh, back in the 1950s and '60s, I had a wonderful childhood.

But this was where Watts Branch ran through and... playing in the stream was just one of those things that we did.

I didn't go to a swimming pool until I was 12, 13 years old because it was a segregated city.

The river was our water recreation space.

So the conditions of the river at that time, the landfill in that section contributed to some pollution in the river, but we had no idea of any of that.

It became illegal to swim right when the Clean Water Act was passed.

NARRATOR: The Clean Water Act of 1972 established federal protection for U.S. waterways from pollution.

Under this Act, the Environmental Protection Agency sets wastewater standards and water quality criteria.

Riverkeepers around the country work to uphold these standards, and defend the right to clean water access.

TREY SHERARD: I became the river keeper because...

I wanted to move into something where I could see more tangible change, more change in what I could watch, right, in my lifetime.

It should never have been allowed to get this far.

NARRATOR: The Anacostia is one of only three rivers in the nation that the Environmental Protection Agency has deemed "impaired by trash."

(ambient sounds of water gurgling).

DENNIS: Why is all this stuff in here, you know?

Ice cooler, and a dog carrier.

TREY: Trash gets dropped wherever it's dropped, and stormwater runoff plows that into the storm drains, out of the storm drains, into creeks... You can watch the Doritos bag float around over here or watch the Gatorade bottle go sailing by...

It's also a major problem for wildlife because wildlife eat plastic.

As it breaks down, it becomes microplastics, sharp, little pieces of plastic that get ingested by wildlife.

So, they physically can cut up the guts of the animals.

They can also fill up.

So, the animal feels full but is getting no nutrition.

NARRATOR: The trash in the Anacostia impacts more than just the wildlife.

Members of the Seafarers Yacht Club have been dealing with it for decades.

(somber music).

(sounds of Howard starting his boat).

NARRATOR: The club was founded in 1945 by Lewis Thomas Green, and became a refuge for Black boaters facing discrimination on the Anacostia.

NARRATOR: The Seafarers also pioneered cleanup efforts, which began in the 1980s with a visit from then-Mayor Marion Barry.

JANET GASAWAY: Marion Barry happened to come down on one of those days after a storm where all the Styrofoam cups were collected and he just said, 'This river is filthy,' he says, 'Why don't you clean up your river?'

JANET: We do get a lot of volunteers without even asking now to come to the Seafarers as their point of cleaning up the Anacostia River.

TREY: Seafarers Yacht Club is a really important member of the community.

For a long time, they've been dealing with all the pollution on the Anacostia River.

It's about as front-line as you can get.

NARRATOR: Many have followed the Seafarers' lead.

Organizations like Anacostia Riverkeeper and the Anacostia Watershed Society have installed "trash traps" to catch debris coming down creeks and streams before it hits the river.

MASAYA MAEDA: Trash traps reduce a good amount of trash coming into the Anacostia River.

We have two types of trash trap.

One is called Nash Run Trash Trap.

It's a screen-type trash trap, and the other one is a River Terrace Trash Trap.

It's a boom-type trash trap... Nash Run Trash Trap, we capture about 2,000 pounds of trash from a 0.7 square mile drainage area.

NARRATOR: At cleanup events like this one, garbage is sorted and measured by volunteers, resulting in data that can be transformed into community action.

STEPHANIE CONANT: We sort it into 27 different categories: plastic bottles, aluminum cans, other plastics.

And then we count those individually to help see what's actually in the river, um, and then hopefully to create legislation.

NARRATOR: The Anacostia Watershed Society installed the first trap in 2009.

Styrofoam represented 22% of the trash it captured.

In 2016, at the urging of the environmental community, a ban on Styrofoam went into effect in Maryland and the District of Columbia.

MASAYA: Volume data was used for Styrofoam ban.

After the ban... the volume of Styrofoam was dramatically reduced from 22% to 3%.

NARRATOR: Hoping to build on the success of D.C.'s Styrofoam ban, environmentalists are turning their attention to the next problem.

TREY: Over 60% of the weight of the trash, physically on the water itself, is just plastic bottles.

And when you look on land, over 50% of all the trash, are some kind of beverage container.

NARRATOR: Trey is pushing for a "bottle bill," which would offer a monetary incentive to recycle bottles, hopefully reducing the number going into rivers.

(shift to more somber music).

TREY: We desperately need a beverage container deposit bill, especially for plastic bottles, but on cans and glass too, If we had just a control on that, right, we would literally cut the trash in half.

All the other problems we talk about, stormwater is either a cause or it's a vehicle.

There's a lot of hard-paved impervious surface upstream in this watershed.

Sidewalk, road, parking lot, roof... something that the rain hits, and can't penetrate and has to runoff from.

NARRATOR: Stormwater runoff does more than push trash into the river, it also erodes the soil, clogging the river with sediment.

DENNIS: You see, a lot of people don't realize, they look at the river and they say, 'Oh, man it looks like chocolate milk or something, you know.'

Well, the water is clear, it's the sediment.

TREY: Seafarers Yacht Club is unfortunately at a particularly accretionary spot in the river, where it's piling up and depositing sediment faster and faster and faster.

TREY: Seafarers Yacht Club can no longer use their boats unless it's high tide.

And why that's not more embarrassing for the capital, I, I really don't understand.

(music swells).

NARRATOR: The Anacostia River was once a great waterway, with depths up to 40 feet.

When the Nacotchtank lived here, abundant marshlands acted as buffers, filtering runoff and keeping erosion in check.

Then came European settlers and, in 1790, a capital city was founded on its banks.

As Washington flourished, the marshes buffering the river were filled in to make way for neighborhoods, roads, factories, power plants, and the many demands of urbanization.

KATRINA LASHLEY: I would say by the 20th century it was very interesting that what had been described as the most healthful place, right, this place of bounty, of just absolute beauty, was at that point one of the most polluted rivers in the nation.

How did the Anacostia go from this bountiful place to the "Forgotten River"?

(ambient sounds of the distant metro and rain on water).

STEPHEN MACAVOY: So, the Anacostia has been neglected for hundreds, 150, 200 years...

It has a lot of legacy problems from development.

(gentle piano music fades in).

NARRATOR: The Anacostia became ground zero for heavy industry.

Guns, canons, and torpedoes were made at the Navy Yard munitions plant, power was generated at PEPCO's Benning Road and Buzzard Point plants, and Washington's trash was dumped and burned at the Kenilworth Park Landfill.

DENNIS: In those early, early days, looked at waterways as a place to discard and dump and get rid of stuff.

And uh that's what led to, you know, the river being in the condition that it was.

STEPHEN: So, you have this historical load of contaminants deposited before we even worried about contaminants.

NARRATOR: Those with political power profited from the industrial corridor that boomed along the river.

But residents of nearby communities paid the price for the development and pollution that followed.

CHRIS WILLIAMS: Well, the sad fact of the Anacostia watershed, of the Anacostia River is that the story of the environmental degradation of the river is also a story of environmental injustice.

KATRINA: Mid-century, 20th century.

You had an influx of people... and then also the building of 295, right, so you have these highways, these concrete ribbons, that in many cases divided communities literally, and also cut communities off from the waterfront itself, and so you had almost an encasing in a concrete ribbon of many communities.

TREY: These were not white neighborhoods impacted by Highway 295, which, when it was built, mostly served redlined communities, white-only in the suburbs....

So there's five neighborhoods in a box... with the river and the burn dump and the coal fire power plant on one side and the highway on the other.

So, it literally didn't matter which way the wind was blowing.

For decades those people living in those neighborhoods were getting sick just by breathing.

(music transition to somber music).

NARRATOR: PCBs are carcinogenic human-made chemicals formerly used in industrial and consumer products.

They were produced from 1929 to 1979, when they were banned in the U.S. Today, PCBs continue to leach into the Anacostia from plants operating legacy equipment or from the improper disposal of industrial waste and consumer products.

They settle into the river's sediment, contaminating aquatic organisms like fish that feed on the bottom, or eat tainted prey.

(transition to more hopeful music).

NARRATOR: A team of biologists from the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service are catching fish using electricity to determine PCB concentrations throughout the river.

The fish caught on these outings are sent to a lab for analysis.

RAQUEL WETZELL: Electrofishing, basically it's utilizing electrical currents, um, sort of to, get the job done of, like, studying fish.

With my backpack, I have a battery attached to it... and that will send out, like, impulses in the water.

And fish who are swimming nearby, they'll get immobilized...

So it's easier for us to net them and put them in the bucket.

It's like a checkup for the Anacostia.

NARRATOR: The Anacostia River Sediment Project is using data from the collected fish to identify contamination hot spots, and outline a plan for remediation.

Cleaning up contaminated hot spots is important because PCBs and other toxins don't just stay in the river, they can travel from fish to humans.

FRED PINKNEY: D.C. Department of Health set fish consumption advisories based on the data largely driven by PCBs.

If people eat too much, they increase their risk of developing cancer, and if pregnant people or young children eat them, there's a chance of neurological damage.

(music fades out).

NARRATOR: For those who love to drop a line, the Anacostia comes with a warning: enjoy catching, but think twice before eating the fish.

(ambient sound of a bell jingling).

CHAQUILLE GAINES: I never ate a fish out of the Anacostia.

Just growing up, just watching what goes on around me, seeing how our people treat the environment.... and you know...

Knowledge is key, so I decided not to.

(ambient conversation).

JASPER MACK: I'm aware of the fishing advisories, but I catch and release.

We have a lot of different species that roam through these waters, and I wanna catch them all.

CHAQUILLE: Everyone I come across, they, they encourage me not to eat it, once I tell them I'm out here fishing, so... STEPHEN: So, if you're eating too many of the fish, you're loading yourself with enzyme-interfering metals, possibly hormone-mimicking chemicals and carcinogens.

It's like a toxic soup in a fish.

NARRATOR: To raise community awareness about the risk of eating fish from the river, Anacostia Riverkeeper holds special angling events.

(group chatter).

TREY: So, Friday night fishing is one of our premier events, every Friday, all summer long.

Fish!

Fish on!

We teach catch-and-release fishing...

But we want people to learn how to fish so that they're engaged, So that they see the river as a positive place.

It's a good first impression and it really helps build that connection so that they can become stewards in the future.

(uplifting music).

NARRATOR: Encouraging stewardship is also a goal of The Anacostia Watershed Society.

Its team of scientists and volunteers are working on a project to restore native freshwater mussels.

JORGE BOGANTES MONTERO: I got one corner here.

Yeah, yeah I think we might be able to do it.

Ok.

Perfect.

NARRATOR: Mussels play a pivotal role in the ecosystem, cleaning the water and providing habitat for other species, but the population has dwindled.

JORGE: Mussels are like the canaries in the coal mine.

Uh so if something goes wrong in terms of, like, nasty pollutants, like heavy metals and ammonia, mussels will not survive.

Middle and Upper Anacostia River, we didn't see that many mussels and we attribute that to the historic pollution.

And that's why we release mussels here at Kingman Lake and also at Kenilworth Lake.

NARRATOR: Since 2019, Jorge and his team have released more than 36,000 mussels.

Each mussel can filter 10 to 20 gallons of water a day, improving water clarity for other aquatic organisms.

JORGE: At the Anacostia Watershed Society, we do water quality monitoring, and we have the State of the River report card.

It got a failing grade for last year's data.

But the overall pattern is that the river conditions are improving.

We see periods of time, especially if the weather is drier, the river's actually meets the swimability if we looked at just bacteria, but that's for a limited period time, you get rain and then, becomes unsafe.

(sound of boat motor).

TREY: You'll see a poop light.

It's technically the combined sewer overflow indicator light, but that just doesn't ring as nice for most people, so it's the poop light.

If the red bulb is ever on, the poop is flowing now from a combined sewer overflow in the District to the Anacostia River.

NARRATOR: Two - thirds of D.C. uses a separate sanitary sewer system, where one set of pipes sends wastewater to a treatment plant, and other pipes send stormwater out to local waterways.

But, one-third of the city uses a combined sewer system where human waste and stormwater flow into the same pipes.

During heavy storms, wastewater and stormwater can overwhelm the system, causing outflows of untreated sewage into local waterways.

CHRIS: The old sewer system was built for a much smaller community.

By the year 1999, 2000, there was about 2 to 3 billion gallons of sewage going into the river every year.

We felt we had no choice but to sue under the Clean Water Act.

(pensive music).

NARRATOR: A lawsuit brought by the Anacostia Watershed Society led to a consent decree where the District's water authority, D.C. Water, agreed to build massive tunnels under the city to catch the raw sewage instead of dumping it into the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers.

Because of the tunnels, residents are getting one step closer to a fishable and swimmable river.

(pensive music continues).

(ambient sound of the metro passing by).

NEWS ANCHOR 1: Well it's your chance to be part of history, but the question is, would you take it?

A week from Saturday, swimmers can make a splash in D.C.'s Anacostia River.

NEWS ANCHOR 2: Yeah, and get this, it's the first time that swimming will be allowed in more than 50 years.

TREY: A lot of people don't realize that there's been over two decades of work across all 176 square miles of the watershed.

We didn't just magically become swimmable overnight.

So "Splash" is going to be the inaugural swim event on the Anacostia River.

It's going to be the first ever legal permitted swim in over half a century, since it became illegal to swim in any natural body of water in D.C. DENNIS: I mean I've been on radio, they called in, and 'Mr.

Chestnut.

No, don't do it.

Don't do it!'

But we've been doing water quality monitoring for the last few years.

And so the decision to do the "Splash" event was on the basis of data.

(thunder).

TREY: We almost jumped into the river September 23rd.

The only reason we didn't was because Tropical Storm Ophelia came through the mid-Atlantic.

The water quality before the storm was prime.

The bacteria were super low.

DENNIS: It was 100% ready for us to, you know, to go in the river.

It was just that it was a bad day.

TREY: We checked with D.C. Water.

There was not a sewage overflow during Tropical Storm Ophelia, which is pretty impressive given how much rain she dropped.

NARRATOR: The new sewer tunnels held up against the tropical storm, and organizers of the "Splash" event are already making plans to swim in the Anacostia in 2024.

It's a ray of hope for this once "Forgotten River."

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON: I am so pleased to be here with D.C. Water to celebrate the completion of the Northeast Boundary Tunnel.

(crowd applause).

(hopeful music fades in).

DAVID GADIS: We are already seeing improvements in the health of the river and the aquatic life.

To date, the tunnel system has captured more than 15 billion gallons of combined sewage that would have otherwise ended up in the Anacostia.

CHRIS WILLIAMS: This giant step toward the goal we all share of an Anacostia River that is swimmable and fishable and restored to health as a thriving river ecosystem in the heart of the nation's capital: it's of particular importance to the people here, east of the river, who've suffered so many injustices, social, environmental, economic for so long.

There's still a lot more that needs to be done.

But the tremendous achievement of getting these tunnels built and operating, well, that gives me hope.

(applause).

(hopeful music continues).

DENNIS: Oh, I'm very optimistic about swimming in the river again.

I look forward to be able to take that dive and it's going to be the start of uh, you know, some wonderful things going forward.

KATRINA: Was the river really forgotten?

Um, in some cases, yes.

But this ongoing love and connection to the Anacostia has always been present in various community groups who've been working for decades to kind of restore and reclaim the river.

JANET: It has gotten a lot cleaner over the years, and we're hoping that it'll still improve.

STEPHANIE: It's actually really fun to be out here with other people feeling like you're doing something, just a little part to help the earth, and thus your community.

TREY: Water access is really, really important to people's psychology, especially in a stressful urban environment.

So to have access to this, right, this is priceless.

And uh it's something that the District needs to do even better on protecting and valuing.

DENNIS: The Anacostia River is Washington, D.C.'s river and I would like to see all of the responsible parties prioritize the Anacostia and make it fishable, swimmable and an iconic river, going forward.

That's my hope for the Anacostia River.

(music plays over credits).

♪ ♪