A structural fault has been ruled out as the cause of last week's glass failure at the Wall St shopping mall in Dunedin.
Council city property manager Kevin Taylor said the mall's external fittings - holding the decorative glass facade to the side of the building - had been checked and found to be in good condition.
That pointed to a failure of the glass panel itself, but Metro Glass staff - who installed the facade - had also ruled out nickel sulphide inclusion, which caused a glass ceiling panel inside the mall to explode in 2011, Mr Taylor said.
That meant the council would have to wait until at least this week, when results of tests on glass fragments recovered from the scene were available, Mr Taylor said.
His comments came after the 6m by 3m glass pane split into two pieces and fell, minutes apart, on to a veranda below on Monday.
Nobody was injured, but a second large pane of the decorative facade - immediately below the one that fell - was also damaged.
Mr Taylor said the remaining damaged panel would have to be removed, and both missing panels replaced by a temporary material ''to fill the gap in the meantime''.
That was expected to happen within the next fortnight, but would require scaffolding, a crane and a traffic management plan to be organised, he said.
If glass test results did not ''reveal something'', the council would have to consider ''what we can do to make sure it doesn't happen again'', he said.
