BURRARD INLET

Description

Essentials about Burrard Inlet in brief

Vancouver is a waterfront city and Burrard Inlet is the city’s dominant body of water. Burrard Inlet is a fjord formed during the last ice age that separates the city and the rest of the flat Burrard Peninsula to the south from the mountain slopes of the North Shore Mountains and the northern neighborhoods of North Vancouver and West Vancouver.

The location of Burrard Inlet

Captain George Vancouver, the town’s namesake, named the inlet after his friend Sir Harry Burrard in 1792. Burrard Inlet runs almost due east from the Straits of Georgia to Port Moody and is about 25 kilometers long. At its widest point, Burrard Inlet is about three kilometers wide. Both banks of the inlet are urban. About two-thirds of its length, a side branch branches off to the north, Indian Arm, which extends more than 20 kilometers into the Coast Mountains.

The use of Burrard Inlet

Three bridges cross Burrard Inlet: Lions Gate Bridge, the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing, and Second Narrows Bridge. The calm waters, protected from the open sea by the Burrard Peninsula (on which downtown Vancouver and Stanley Park are located), form the most important part of Vancouver’s harbor and are easily accessible to large cargo ships. Although some stretches of shoreline are lined with residential and commercial zones, industrial zones clearly dominate, with port facilities, freight yards, terminals for container and bulk carriers, grain elevators, and oil refineries. Ships waiting for berths in Vancouver Harbor often anchor in English Bay, the southern part of the mouth of Burrard Inlet.

Along the main fjord, some forested areas have been preserved in their original state. The shores of Indian Arm, on the other hand, are so steep that they have not been built on to this day, despite their relative proximity to a major city.