Terrified shoppers fled as cladding tiles on six-storey building crashed to the ground smashing onto parked cars in the street.

The incident happened in the city of Xiaogan in the Chinese province of Hubei on 12th April.

In video footage of the drama, tile cladding on the building can be seen flapping in high winds.

One pedestrian can be seen running backwards to avoid to falling debris.

A man working in a nearby shop – named only Mr Zhou – told local media the tiles fell as soon as the wind started to blow, as they were too loose.

The police arrived at the scene and banned pedestrians from walking through the area, while maintenance personnel checked the outer wall of the building.

Several vehicles were damaged by the falling cladding

The video gained a lot of comments on the social network Douyin – a Chinese version of TikTok – blaming poor maintenance of the building.

One netizen ‘hanako loves mom’ said: “They all blamed the wind.”

While ‘Li Wei’ wrote: “There is a problem with the quality of the building, it has nothing to do with the wind.”