A BUILDING firm must pay £9,000 over an incident in which children playing with a can of paint thinners were burned when the can exploded.

Eight-year-old Jodie Blackburn, her brother, Simon, 13, and twins Oliver and James Richards, eight, found the canister on a building site in Moor Lane, close to their homes at Hunsingore, near Knaresborough.

Health and Safety Executive prosecutor Alan Parkes yesterday told Harrogate magistrates they took their find to a den where they had lit a fire.

The thinners, highly flammable with a flashpoint around the 12 degrees Centigrade mark, exploded and the children were burned.

Jodie received the most serious burns and was kept in hospital for a couple of weeks, while one of the boys had to have skin grafts to a leg.

Mr Parkes said Holroyd Construction was building four houses, and when two were finished the firm took down the two-metre high security fence surrounding the site.

The company's health and safety plan said hazardous materials should be locked away, but the canister had been left against a wall near a rubbish skip.

Three years earlier, the company had dispensed with the services of health and safety experts and taken on the job in-house, giving the safety brief to a director. ''The overall effect was that the safety management system was semi-derelict,'' said Mr Parkes.

Holroyd Construction, of Parkhill, Wetherby, was fined a total of £8,000 and ordered to pay £1,000 costs after pleading guilty to failing to appoint a competent person to look after site safety, failing to carry out effective control and monitoring arrangements, and allowing non-employees to be exposed to risk by not preventing access to a building site compound and hazardous materials.

Company counsel Corin Furness said Holroyd's was sorry children had suffered from what had been an isolated breach of duty by a company with an otherwise unblemished record.

The company had now corrected its misapprehension that it could manage without independent health and safety advice by employing outside experts again.

Afterwards, Jodie's parents, Gordon and Julie Blackburn, said they were happy with the penalties. All the children had recovered, although two of them remained scarred.

Updated: 10:21 Saturday, November 24, 2001