More than one-tenth of the largest wild population of threatened salmon in the Central Valley died after repair work near a power plant led Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to cut off a cooling flow of water into a creek, wildlife and utility officials said Friday.

PG&E, the state’s largest utility, restored the water flow on Wednesday to a remote stretch of Butte Creek, home to the largest of three surviving wild populations of Central Valley spring-run Chinook salmon.

The death of 277 of the fewer than 2,000 adult chinook in the creek underscored the vulnerability of one of California’s most iconic species in a drought year marked by record low amounts of cooling snow melt.

Read the full story at http://www.scpr.org/news/2015/06/19/52561/threatened-salmon-die-after-utility-pg-e-temporari/