A newly refurbished and extended one-mile trail allows bicyclists as well as walkers and runners to go along the southern side of the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River.

The Brentwood Levee Trail starts not far from Rhode Island Avenue as it crosses the river, heading west along the Arundel Canal to the 38th Street bridge and then curving down to Webster Street, just a block from Thomas S. Stone Elementary School in Mount Rainier.

Constructed by Prince George’s County departments of public works and the environment, the asphalt trail offers two connections to the Northwest Branch Trail, giving bicyclists and pedestrians another way to avoid going on surface streets.

The trail project came about, oddly enough, because of Hurricane Katrina.

After that hurricane devastated New Orleans in 2005, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers studied levees around the country to see if they would hold up, determining that the Allison Street Levee should be extended and raised four feet and the bridge replaced.

The nearby area is now considered to have a 1 percent annual chance of a flood that could go beyond the levee.

As in New Orleans, flooding has played a role in the area’s racial history. Because of the persistent flooding on the Northwest Branch, nearby land was less valuable, making it affordable enough to become home to Brentwood, the first community planned for African Americans after Reconstruction.

Capt. Wallace Bartlett, a veteran commander of the U.S. Colored Troops who started Brentwood, dealt with the flooding by digging ditches, which were replaced when the original levee was built in the 1950s and expanded in the 1980s.

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