You can legally swim in the Anacostia River for a few hours this September.

Swimming has been illegal in the river since 1971 due to pollution, but infrastructure improvements and other efforts have improved water quality enough that D.C. is allowing the sanctioned swim.

Organized by the Anacostia Riverkeeper, the Splash community event will allow participants over the age of 18 to swim off the Kingman Island Dock near the National Arboretum for 20-minute time slots with a pre-registration.

Originally scheduled for this weekend, the Riverkeeper announced Friday that it would be postponed until Saturday, Sept. 16, due to several recent bursts of rain that could stir up pollution in the river. All registrations for this weekend are automatically being transferred for that date.

The city has been slowly moving to improve water quality in the Anacostia since the 1970s, with lawsuits against chemical manufacturers and agricultural companies and the new Anacostia River Tunnel, which directs sewage overflow to a wastewater treatment plant.

The Anacostia Watershed Society has also long promoted an effort to make the river swimmable and fishable by 2025.

In 2022, the DC Citizen Science Water Quality Monitoring Program found that bacteria levels passed recreational water quality standards at Kingman Island, Buzzards Point and Washington Channel over 90 percent of the time.

There is still work to be done. The Riverkeeper says dredging the river bottom would remove toxins that accumulated long ago and create more capacity for big storms.

But the sanctioned swim in September is meant to highlight the progress that the city has made over the last 50 years.

To register for the swim, go online here.

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