El Dorado Hills Man Says California Won't Let Him Save Fish From Drought-Starved Lake

EL DORADO HILLS (CBS13) — An El Dorado Hills man's effort to save fish from the shrinking Bass Lake is being rejected by the state of California.

The lake is almost gone, and now the fish are surviving in the shallow section of water that's left.

One man who has a full lake in his backyard says he's willing to help with some desperate measures.

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"I said I would help—some people would probably be willing to help, we could catch a few we could save a few, whatever it would take," Bill Hardy said.

His home backs up to an immaculate man-made lake he wants to use as an underwater evacuation center for fish facing death in Bass Lake.

"I thought it'd be great to have a fish rescue," he said.

Hardy, lives across the street from Bass Lake, and each day of this drought he's watched it sink lower and lower. The once sprawling lake now looks more like a big puddle, and beneath what's left of the water are bass.

"Many years ago they planted bass and Floridian bass and they've gotten quite large," he said.

He's willing to take the bass out of Bass Lake, and plunge them into his backyard habitat. He thought of the idea after seeing a fish kill last week when Mountain Meadows reservoir dried up near Susanville.

"Here's just another case of some fish are going to die, and why?" he said.

He took the idea to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife—a state government organization tasked with saving native endangered fish during the drought.

But the department won't allow hardy's fish transfer because Floridian bass aren't an endangered species, and any fish rescues must be handled by fish and wildlife scientists by law.

"I just thought how does something have to be so complicated?" he said. "And this time the drought has brought the lake down so far it's pretty much inevitable that it's going to dry up."

One man's good-hearted effort to save Fish stuck in one of California's shrinking lakes getting the hook by California state scientists.

No rain is expected in the next few weeks, and Hardy believes the lake could be gone by the end of October.