The first hour
Cordon the area beneath. Whatever fell came from somewhere, and the tiles adjacent to the void it left are the most likely next candidates. The exclusion zone should extend beyond the impact point — tiles falling from height do not land directly below.
Photograph three things: the fallen tile, the void it left on the facade, and the impact location. Take them before anything is cleared.
Record the time and the conditions. Was it during or after rain? After a typhoon? During a temperature swing? This is diagnostic information, and it is also the record that establishes when the committee became aware.
Notify. Residents, and — depending on where it landed — the building manager and, if it reached a public thoroughfare, the relevant authority.
That is the first hour. It is deliberately not "call a repair contractor".
The first week
Here is the decision that determines what this costs you over the next five years.
The wrong instinct: get someone to replace the tiles that fell.
Why it is wrong: a tile that falls has been debonded for a long time. It did not fail suddenly; it finished failing suddenly. The mechanism that debonded it — adhesive degradation, thermal cycling, water ingress behind the tile, substrate movement — operates across a zone, not on a single tile. The tiles that fell are the ones furthest along a process that the tiles around them are also in.
Replace only what fell, and you have repaired the symptom that already resolved itself and left the ones that have not.
What to do instead: survey the elevation. Specifically, survey for hollowing — tiles still in place but debonded. That is the population that matters, and it is invisible from the ground.
Infrared thermography reads it: a void behind a tile changes how that patch heats and cools relative to sound substrate. A whole-elevation thermal survey turns "one tile fell" into "these 340 tiles are debonded, clustered here and here".
Setting repair priority
Once you have that map, order the work by consequence, not by severity grade.
Tier 1 — above people. Entrances, pedestrian routes, balconies, parking bays, outdoor seating, anything at a property boundary. A moderate defect here outranks a severe one elsewhere, because this is where a fall causes injury and liability.
Tier 2 — clustered hollowing. Clusters indicate systemic bond failure rather than isolated defects, and they propagate. A cluster left alone becomes next year's Tier 1.
Tier 3 — water ingress paths. Cracking and open joints that admit water accelerate everything else. Sealing them is cheap relative to what they cause.
Tier 4 — isolated findings on low-consequence elevations. These genuinely can wait for the next cycle, and saying so explicitly in the report is part of what makes the budget defensible.
The liability point
For a residential building, the management committee is generally the responsible party for common property maintenance. Two facts follow.
A documented decision is defensible; an undocumented one is not. Deciding to phase repairs over three years, minuted with the survey evidence attached, is a reasonable exercise of judgement. The same decision taken informally and unrecorded looks, after an incident, like nothing was done.
Awareness starts the clock. Once a tile has fallen and been documented, the committee is on notice. What happens next is measured against that.
This is not an argument for panic. It is an argument for a survey, a written priority order, and a minuted decision.
What this looks like in practice
The sequence we run: whole-elevation drone survey with thermal, AI classification across 13 defect types, on-site verification of the significant findings by a qualified inspector, then a defect schedule with coordinates, severity grades and a consequence-weighted priority order the committee can vote on.
That is the annual facade health check, and after a spalling incident it is the fastest route from "something fell" to "we know what to do and in what order".
Book an asset assessment or call +886-2-7733-7678.
