State wildlife officials released hundreds of thousands of baby steelhead trout from a Northern California fish hatchery on Wednesday — months too early — to try to save their lives in the face of a severe drought.

The baby trout, known as salmonids, were deposited into the American River near Sacramento in the hope that they can survive the heat of summer expected to make water in the drought-stricken state’s hatcheries too warm for them.

The fish normally get many more months to grow in the relative safety of hatcheries before being released into the river, where they swim to the Pacific Ocean to spawn and repopulate Northern California waterways.

California’s fisherman contribute more than $300 million to the state economy.

So, on Wednesday, California Department of Fish and Wildlife workers netted and removed the last of more than 400,000 trout fingerlings from the Nimbus Fish Hatcheryin Gold River, trucked them to a boat launch and released them into the American River.

Water at the hatchery is expected to rise to 78 degrees by late summer, far too hot for the baby fish to tolerate.

“That’s too hot for steelhead,” Gary Novak, the hatchery manager, told the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper.

“We expect they will have a better chance in the river,” Novak said, where the fish could find cooler spots.

“The situation is pretty severe — I have to get rid of all my fish and then hope it rains next year,” he said.

Nimbus Fish Hatchery is one of 22 such facilities run by the state to supply tens of millions of fish to California rivers, which would have been overfished to extinction without the program, the newspaper said.

On Wednesday, the last 85,000 finger-sized babies were released from the hatchery’s tanks and workers with nets scooped them up to be transported to the American River and released.

The Nimbus hatchery released the last of its 3.6 million chinook salmon a few weeks ago, the newspaper said, and the American River Trout Hatchery in nearby Fair Oaks has released all of its fish.

“This happens to be the tip of the iceberg,” Novak said.

“We have the warmest water, (but) with this drought I would assume there is concern at every hatchery,” he said.

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Water flows into the American River have been increased despite the drought.

State and federal water managers are fighting to prevent San Francisco Bay salinity from intruding into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The Sacramento Bee reports the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation increased water releases from Nimbus Dam into the American River yesterday as they did late last month.

Because of drought and very low snow melt, there isn’t enough natural runoff from the Sierra Nevada to hold salt water out of the Delta.

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As California slips into summer amid the worst drought in a generation, state residents, as a whole, have done relatively little to cut their water use, falling well short of the 20 percent target set in Gov. Jerry Brown’s emergency drought declaration in January.

Between January and May of this year, California as a whole cut its water use 5 percent compared to the same period over the preceding three years, according to data released Tuesday during a meeting of the State Water Resources Control Board. The figures were drawn from a survey of water agencies across the state conducted by water board staff. The survey was sent to 443 water agencies but completed by only 270, representing about 25 million retail water customers.

Max Gomberg, a senior environmental scientist for the board, said water use actually increased statewide in January, a month that is normally the state’s wettest but instead proved to be extraordinarily dry. During February through April – months immediately following the governor’s drought declaration – there was no significant conservation. Water use statewide was essentially the same in those months as the prior three years.

Only in May did conservation seemingly take hold, with water agencies in aggregate reporting a water savings of 25 percent. That seems encouraging, but it was before the hot months of summer when water demand typically peaks.

“Nevertheless, it’s a promising sign that the May usage went down,” Gomberg said.

The state water board met Tuesday to begin discussing whether more statewide conservation measures are needed. They invited a number of local water agency officials to provide input. Those officials said it’s difficult to impose blanket conservation goals because each region of the state is different, with different water needs. Nevertheless, they all said they are striving to meet the 20 percent target.

The state’s data showed that the best conservation progress occurred among water agencies in the Sacramento Valley region, which reported a 10 percent savings from January through May. The worst was along the Central Coast and in the San Francisco Bay Area, which reported zero and 2 percent conservation, respectively.

“The customers have stepped up, is really what it comes down to,” said John Woodling, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Water Authority. “If you drive around this region, the lawns are brown and yellow. The lawns aren’t lush and green like they used to be.”

Other water agencies told the board that progress may appear small because they have been working hard for years to reduce water consumption as a general practice to manage water resources for the long term.

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