THE steel giant threatening thousands of job losses must pay a six-figure fine after a worker was scarred for life by an explosion of molten metal.

Chris Reading had worked at Tata’s Rotherham steelworks for 33 years before he almost died in March 2012 when 25 tons of molten metal spilled from a furnace and then exploded in his face.

Tata, which has recently slashed jobs at Rotherham and is now threatening redundancies in Scunthorpe and Lanarkshire, pleaded guilty to two breaches of health and safety law at Sheffield Crown Court on Tuesday.

The international steel company was fined £180,000 and ordered to pay £82,979.26 in costs.

Incredibly, workers at the site were instructed to hose water onto spillages — despite the widely known risk of this causing a blast.

Health and Safety Executive inspector Denise Fotheringham said the worker’s “life-changing injuries” had made a “devastating impact” upon him and his family.

“Tragically, it could have been avoided had Tata assessed the risks of dealing with molten metal spillages,” Ms Fotheringham said.

“The company’s business is to make steel, but they had no procedures for dealing with these spillages, leading to employees using hoses to cool the metal.

“This was very dangerous, but the scale of risk had not been recognised by workers, who had received no other information or instruction on what to do.”

The disaster followed a fire in the plant’s furnace control system, after which the system had been temporarily bypassed.

On the day of the explosion an electrician had been ordered to remove the stop-gap workaround — erroneously believing that the faults had been repaired.

After the incident the worker was rushed to a specialist burns unit and put into an induced coma for three weeks.

He needed numerous skin grafts and plastic surgery to reconstruct his eyes, ears and forehead.

A Tata spokesman said: “We carried out a full investigation into the cause of the incident and put into place a range of measures to prevent this type of accident happening again.”