The attachment came crashing down onto the bonnet of a car on Tuesday afternoon, just as a large group of people were about to cross the road.
The site on Customs Street East in Auckland is soon to be home to New Zealand's tallest new apartment tower and is being built by China Construction.
So how often do incidents like this happen, and what do construction companies need to do to keep pedestrians safe?
Jeff Strampl from Site Safe told Wilhelmina Shrimpton the more incidences that are reported, the better.
"Until we know what's happening, we can't do anything about it," Strampl said.
"Sometimes these things happen out in places that aren't in the full public eye. Not all jobs are run by the big companies who are usually pretty okay in this area but inevitably, the information we get from WorkSafe, is that they often come across things where they find there have been events and they haven't been reported to them."
"Culturally, we just keep encouraging them [companies] to report."
Strampl admitted one of the roadblocks to reporting these incidences is the fact that WorkSafe is also the regulator, so there may be enforcement action that results from reporting them.
"There's that reluctance on the part of some companies where they still operate under the impression they may end up dobbing themselves in, so to speak," he said.
"To be fair to WorkSafe, always take a corrective action approach before they look at enforcement. My understanding is they will only go to the farthest ends of enforcement, which is prosecution, in worst-case scenarios."
Strampl added that, normally, companies have regulations in place that don't allow pedestrians or vehicles to be directly underneath areas that could prove dangerous.
"We would expect that in anything that's going up high-rise, the perimetres of the building and inside the building structure as well - anything that could potentially fall off - is protected," he told Shrimpton.
"I haven't heard of an occurrence of this nature in years."
Listen to the full interview between Jeff Strampl and Lloyd Burr above.
You can also download the full interview on the Lloyd Burr Live podcast, and listen on the go.
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