Looking at the mountain of yellow sulphur on the north side of Burrard Inlet, the churn of ferries, fishboats and freighters, the industrial-zone shore, the buzzing float planes and the loading cranes, you’d be forgiven for assuming the inlet is a marine dead zone.

And that’s not to mention the tonnes of toilet water that get flushed into the inlet from outfall pipes and the former oil refineries perched on the water’s edge.

So it’s hard for the casual observer to imagine that anything more is alive in all that muck than a few tumour-laden finned things, some clumps of mutated seaweed, and perhaps a version of the Loch Ness monster snuggled down in a nest of petrochemical sludge on the seabed.

But that casual observer would be so wrong.

True, the inlet has been called “the most polluted body of water in Canada.” The herring that used to be so numerous in the 19th century are long gone. There have been reports of fish with liver tumours.

But there is life — lots of it — beneath the surface.

The surf smelt still come in sufficient numbers to support a small but dedicated band of net fishermen. When federal Fisheries manager Jeff Johansen goes for his lunch-hour walk around Coal Harbour these days, he sees young salmon, likely from the Capilano River, cruising the shoreline in search of food.

And when divers went into the water into Coal Harbour near Canada Place, they found 11 forms of algae, three kinds of anemones, two brands of tube worms and two more of sea cucumbers, and a whole collection of sea stars, including the purple, the pink, the mottled, the leather, the blood, the vermillion and the sunflower. There are two types of barnacles, acorn and giant, the coonstriped shrimp, and six types of crabs: red rock, Dungeness, hermit, box, decorator, and longhorn decorator, an evocative name that calls up an image of a Finding Nemo-style crab character with a cowboy hat giving advice on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Along with those, there are mollusks such as the mossy chiton and the frosted nudibranch, and fish — tube snouts, surfperch and sculpin.

“To be honest, the inlet is quite productive,” Johansen says.

And it’s now the job of the people building the $565-million convention centre expansion on the Coal Harbour shoreline to make sure they provide a pleasant home for all these critters in, around, and underneath its million-plus square feet of concrete — sort of like providing nice gravel and a castle for your aquarium-living goldfish, only on a grander scale.

And a more formal one, as well.

The hope is that the surprising abundance of life in the inlet can be increased through habitat improvement measures built in conjunction with the new centre.

It took Johansen, who was the manager of major-projects review until recently, and convention-centre planners, led by marine biologist Rick Hoos from EBA Engineering, two years to work out the exact details of this downtown sea life revitalization

It will also cost several million dollars to put in place everything that was agreed to.

It’s not what Fisheries originally wanted. The department tried to get the convention-centre people to buy a piece of land along the shore in another part of the inlet and rehabilitate that.

But, as Vancouverites know, waterfront land is pricey and sometimes impossible to get at any price.

So, eventually, negotiators agreed to accept the second-best solution, which was to rehabilitate the environment right on the spot.

The easiest part is the reconstruction of the shoreline.

That’s what grademan Bruce Kuhn has been working on for the last couple of weeks.

Kuhn is the guy out there in the white overalls who guides the gravel-shovellers into sculpting the perfectly graded shoreline, the grown-up version of sandcastle-building. Working from a complex set of diagrams and using what looks like an exceptionally long white yardstick (which is actually part of a system that includes laser beams emitted from a camera-like object sitting on a tripod nearby), Kuhn ensures that the slope of the shore all the way around the site is a perfect two-horizontal-to-one-vertical grade.

Once the slope has been smoothed to that geometric ideal, a filter cloth will be laid over it, then smaller stone, then large rocks, known in the trade as rip-rap.

A casual observer might think these are just any old big rocks. But, as with everything else, their size has been carefully calibrated and agreed to by vast teams of experts from fisheries and the convention centre.

“If you have smaller rock, you don’t have the large [crevices] that fish like,” says Johansen. “And the bigger rock also provides more surface for things to grow on.”

It’s the same kind of shoreline that was reconstructed along the seawall all the way west to the Bayshore Hotel.

But the convention-centre site will be adding more features besides that shore reconstruction.

Underneath the building, an intertidal zone will be constructed.

The ground from about the mid-point of the site to the shore under the building will be scraped down another two metres so high tides will wash into it. More special stone will be put down. And small water-draining channels will be dug out to ensure water doesn’t stay under the building and get stagnant.

So while conventioneers are watching their power-point demonstrations on more effective ways to think positively and network in the office, below them will be a moist little underworld where crab, shrimp, mussels, barnacles and anything that likes living in the 100-per-cent-no-sunlight universe will be scuttling (or lying rather inertly) around.

Another little world will be specially constructed off the tip of the point of land closest to Canada Place, the only piece of shore that will stick out past the boundaries of the convention-centre floor.

Originally, there hadn’t been anything beyond the big-rock treatment planned for that point.

But then the convention centre’s roof design changed in that northeast corner.

The city’s urban-design panel, in its first, largely negative review of the design, suggested the building be given more shape and drama on the waterfront by having the roof edge swoop up at the northeast corner.

That meant that it stuck out farther and cast more shadow.

Working in consultation with Jeff Marliave from the Vancouver Aquarium, fisheries and the expansion planners agreed that, in compensation, the project would also include a cluster of boulders on the point and an artificial reef in the water.

“Marliave said if we did this, it would create really neat habitat for rockfish, wolf eels and ling cod,” says Hoos. “There aren’t many places where these fish have suitable habitat.”

It will be even more fish-seducing once the expected forest of bull kelp grows up from the reef.

Finally, and this was the biggest negotiating point of all, the project builders agreed to build a first-of-its-kind series of concrete terraces along the bottom edge of the building.

To you, it might look like an odd series of steps cantilevered off the building, coming from nowhere and going nowhere along the waterline, serving no particular purpose.

But this “marine habitat skirt,” which was produced after several brainstorming sessions among engineers, planners, project managers, and fisheries people, serves several purposes, besides soaking up $3 million to $5 million in construction costs.

It made the city’s design team happy, because it acts as a kind of concrete venetian blind, hiding the pilings that the convention centre will sit on.

“The city really didn’t want this thing that was perched up on sticks — it would look ugly,” Johansen said.

It also helps with security. The post-9/11 era has produced a couple of changes in the building. One of them was a desire to ensure that access to the underside of the building would be restricted.

And finally, it makes baby salmon happy, along with crabs and seaweed.

Between March and August, Burrard Inlet is actually a daycare centre for young salmon from the rivers and streams that run into it. Because Coal Harbour is shallow, they like hanging around there, snacking on things they find close to the shore, while they’re in their teenage phase.

The ledges, which involved negotiating to make special pre-cast concrete with artfully designed irregularities, tide-pool-creating dips and rough spots, will provide a place for slimy things to grow, which encourages other forms of sea life that salmon like to eat.

So with the ledges, “we’re making sure they have continued groceries,” says Hoos.

So after spending all these millions of dollars on carefully constructed shorelines, reefs, marine skirts and the like, what will be the improvement besides the abstract satisfaction of knowing that we human beings aren’t systematically destroying the planet?

Well, as it turns out, no one can say definitively.

After Burrard Inlet was identified repeatedly in the 1970s and ’80s as a hotbed of pollution, the wheels started to grind slowly toward trying to clean it up.

A special collection of experts monitors what happens in Burrard Inlet and another reviews most building projects to assess their impact on marine habitat.

But no one can say exactly what has happened in the past couple of decades, beyond a general sense that things are getting better.

“I’d like to think that we’re progressing,” Johansen said.

But, like parents, those who are spending millions to get just the right kind of rock and irregular concrete and those who are monitoring Burrard Inlet, have to operate on a little bit of faith, hoping that a lot of care and attention will produce good results 20 years later.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005