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People gather fish in a water reservoir on the Dnieper river near Kyiv in Vyshhorod, Ukraine, Monday, March 15, 2010. AP Hundreds of tons of fish have died at a reservoir near the Ukrainian capital after authorities abruptly lowered the water level in a bid to reduce the impact of spring floods, scientists said Tuesday.

Hundreds of tons of fish have died at a reservoir near the Ukrainian capital after authorities abruptly lowered the water level in a bid to reduce the impact of spring floods, scientists said Tuesday.

The fish were trapped after the water was quickly discharged on Friday from the reservoir — located about 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of the capital. They were either crushed to death under the surface ice or suffocated.

Scientists and ecological experts have criticized the move and warned that it will have a lasting negative impact on the environment.

"The fish have died in thousands of hectares (acres)," said Serhiy Afanasyev, a deputy head of the Kyiv-based Hydrobiology Institute. "The fish that survived will be weakened. It's not clear how the water will react as a self-cleaning system, how the reservoir ecosystem will cope with that. The dead fish will rot. Water will turn into a stinking liquid."

Afanasyev criticized the move as "criminal negligence," saying that the fear of devastating spring floods wasn't a sufficient justification for such an abrupt action.

He said the quick discharge of water from the reservoir, called the Kyiv Sea by the locals, also could be dangerous because it could have stirred up radioactive fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster festering at the bottom. "I don't rule out that bottom sediment will rise up, together with radionuclides," Afanasyev said.

Igor Tykholaz, a spokesman for the Kyiv branch of the state fishing protection agency, also warned about long-lasting impact of the move.

"The bottom gets uncovered, water plants that feed the fish die, spawning sites disappear. Kyiv hasn't known such an ecological catastrophe for dozens of years at least," he was quoted as saying Tuesday by the daily newspaper Fakty.

Tykholaz said his agency advised the State Water Committee against making the move, but its arguments were ignored.

A spokesman for the committee, Oleksiy Chinariov, denied the allegations and insisted that the water discharge was gradual and hadn't done too much harm to fish.