Workers have found more loose cladding on a building in Auckland's CBD which had a large panel fall onto a major road during strong winds yesterday.
The incident at Victopia apartment has closed off part of Victoria Street West, between Nelson and Hobson streets, outside the TVNZ building, since about 1.30pm yesterday.
Auckland Mayor Phil Goff says the council will need to ask the building owner some "hard questions".
"Public safety has to be the paramount consideration. Steps need to be taken to deal with the risk of further panels falling and we hope that can be done as quickly as possible," Mr Goff told 1 NEWS today.
"Council and AT staff are working with the building owners to ensure work is done to the proper standard as fast as possible. I expect council officers to be asking hard questions of the building owner about the safety of the panels on this building."
Ian Harris, the body corporate representative for Victoria apartments, said he wouldn't expect the road to be open until next week.
"We'll be working as much as we can over the weekend, and as quickly as we can to help get the repairs completed," he said.
The panel, about two-metres-square, fell from the 13th floor of the 15-year-old building.
"We obviously knew that there were some failure in certain areas of the panel but it's come as a complete surprise that these panels could fall off," Mr Harris said.
Repairs started on the building in April with plans to continue into next year.
A large crane has been onsite today checking the cladding of the building site and workers have found several other panels which were loose.
Auckland Council acting general manager for building consents Sally Grey said the roads were shut for good reason - so no one is injured - and they would only be opened once it is safe to do so.
She said the panels were "pretty heavy", adding that "when anything falls from a height there is a real danger to the people below it".
Part of Victoria Street West remains closed after the material plummeted to the ground yesterday.
The building owners had been on the verge of replacing the cladding.
"I think when you look at the building and the size of the panels, closing the road is the only option," Ms Grey said. "Until the building experts understand the full risks, we could never put people in danger.
"Our role obviously is to ensure the public safety - that's what we're here for."
An inner city worker, Kathryn Mitchell, was headed to a meeting when she saw the panel come off the building yesterday.
"We just saw something fly down, make a really big noise when it hit ground," she said. "We weren't scared by it, it was just weird to see something, sort of, flying into the sky. It made a really loud bang.
"But it wasn't very windy to be very, very honest. There were a few gusts of wind going up Victoria Street but it wasn't crazy so I'm unsure how they can say it was the wind that brought the panel down."
Brent Gray, a cafe manager at Empire, which is just across the road from where the incident happened, said today had been abnormally quieter than usual - with significantly less foot traffic.
"I think people are avoiding the city completely because they've been told not to come in, or whether people are working from home I don't know, but it's definitely not a normal Friday trade for us - that's for sure."
Mr Gray was working yesterday when the incident happened. "I just heard a bang and I happened to see out the corner of my eye some debris fly across the road," he said, adding it was lucky nobody was standing in the area at the time.
The stretch of road feeds off a lot of traffic from the Southern Motorway, so the message from Auckland Transport this morning was for people not to drive into the city today, but to instead use their services.
No one was reported injured, but police initially blocked some lanes after the incident, reportedly out of fear another panel could fall after water gets in behind it.
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