Sutter Health Mountain View
Mountain View, CA
The Sutter Health hospital location in Mountain View is a full-service medical facility that offers family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics, as well as an outpatient surgical center, an urgent care center, diagnostic radiology, and laboratory departments.
Sutter Health brought in Skyline Engineering, Inc., decades ago to help manage the infrastructure of the buildings across Sutter’s network from roofs to windows. Skyline developed a master plan for buildings ready for roof maintenance, repair, or replacement.
When it came time to replace the roofing systems at Sutter Health hospital in Mountain View, Skyline put out the call to a handful of local roofing contractors, including Bigham Taylor, who had worked with Skyline on a handful of other projects, including the Albany Care Center. After a round of bid considerations, Sutter awarded Bigham Taylor Roofing the contract to tear off and reroof an 80,000-square-foot area above an active medical facility, plus work on a second-floor patio and a set of round metal roofs.
| Location | Mountain View, CA |
| Client | Sutter Health |
| Scope | Reroof |
| Completed | 2025 |
| Size | 80,000 square feet |
“The biggest challenge on this job is that we had many different types of systems being installed,” recalled Skyline Principal and Project Engineer Nathan Schalesky. “The single–ply is the main system. We had the metal roof system. The patio is unique. It doesn’t happen very often to have a roof membrane system under an elevated paver system with living space underneath. We also had waterproofing elements, including coatings applied to the walls, replacing old sealants, various metal mansards, and cementitious parapet walls.
“It’s very unique [to find a company] that can handle all of that,” he adds.
Bigham Taylor Senior Project Manager Ed Newman concurs. “This was a complex project with a bunch of different scopes of work. The roof sections were difficult to access and work on, because it’s an active hospital and they can’t shut everything down.”
As with every BT job, planning and communication were essential to the success of this project. Weekly meetings with department heads of the areas where crews planned to work that week and facility managers started in September 2024. BT presented methods of procedure (MOPs) documents for approval before any work began.
BT built scaffolding, stair towers, and a bridge above and across the hospital’s driveway to get materials on and off the roof. “It was the only place our crews could create a staging area and where we could put dumpsters,” Ed explains. “It was pretty intense because there are a lot of pedestrian walkways, patient entries, and things to consider.”
Project 1: The Main Roof
There are 16 different departments delivering healthcare at the Sutter Health Mountain View facility, each with extremely low tolerance for noise, dust, and odor intrusion, so medical professionals could continue to deliver care.
The main flat roof areas consisted of both concrete and metal decks. During the extensive tear-off down to the metal deck days, BT’s crews had to be extra vigilant about noise, since the noise caused by the reverberation of the deck in those areas would shut down the departments underneath if not scheduled and completed correctly.
“When we were working above some of those departments, we couldn’t do tear-off during the week,” explains BT Superintendent Naum Zelaya. “So, we worked a lot of Saturdays.”
On other days, the crew bounced between different areas to accommodate medical procedures and service schedules. Even then, when they got down to the metal deck, the crews had to walk gently and stage materials as quietly as possible.
“The coordination between Ed and Naum was incredibly intense to keep this job going with the weekend work and moving between areas,” remarks General Manager Steve Galli. “Plus, the internal communication with the hospital and keeping the schedule intact was intense throughout the project.”
As with many hospital roofs, this one features two mechanical areas on a concrete deck. “The tear-off in those areas was not a big impact on the tenant, because the concrete muffled a lot of the noise.”
In addition to Ed and Naum, BT benefited from the experience, knowledge, and dedication of Foreman Amado Jauregui on this project. “He ran the crews really well,” Ed says. “Many other good roofing foremen would have floundered. He kept it together, and it was smooth. He is one of the best in the business in all aspects of the job, from safety, to site management, production, quality, and communication.”
Beyond those challenges, BT completed much of the roof tear-off during 2024’s rain season. “So, we had to get the roof watertight before we left every night,” says Naum. “We couldn’t have any water damage, especially with all the expensive equipment underneath the roof. That also limited us to only taking off 20 to 30 squares per day.”
Once the crew removed the old roof and cleaned the deck, BT’s crew adhered 2 ½” of ISO insulation to the deck, then adhered a ¼” cover board to the ISO, and finally applied an adhered 80 mil Siplast fleece-backed thermoplastic membrane system. The Siplast system has a 30-year warranty.
“We had to be careful when it came time to adhere the insulation, cover board, and system,” Ed reports. “The adhesives all have a slight odor, and they couldn’t shut off any of the mechanical systems on the roof. So, we implemented odor mitigation by putting charcoal filters on the air intakes.”
The scope of work included the replacement of all existing crickets with new tapered polyIsocyanurate (ISO) insulation, increasing the width and slope of many to improve slope to drain, and installing crickets on the high sides of all curbs. As requested, BT also installed walk pads from roof access points to serviceable equipment systems and new drain inserts.
Ensuring Patient, Staff, and Crew Safety
“The biggest safety concern above and beyond our already rigorous standards had to do with a lot of the scaffolding and pedestrian walkways,” explains Ed. “Some of the demo we did on the metal roofs was directly over the employee entrance on one side and then directly above the loading dock on the other.
“The amount of public safety work on that job is extensive,” he adds.
Work on the Patios
There are 4,000 square feet of patio space on the second floor of the Mountain View facility that includes planters, tables, and outdoor furniture on an elevated pedestrian paver system.
“We pulled the paver system apart, redid the waterproofing system, added a drainage mat, and then put it all back together,” explains Ed. “That included the irrigation system under the pavers for the planter boxes, which we had to reconnect.”
The waterproofing system was a multiple ply Siplast modified bitumen built-up roof system with a liquid-applied coating added. “Both of those products have odors, and we couldn’t have those odors go into the cafeteria and hospital,” Ed says. “So, we covered the doors and windows with plastic to keep the odors out.”
The Siplast system on the patios has a 20-year warranty.
Curved Metal Roof Areas
The two curved standing seam metal roofs at Sutter Health in Mountain View anchored the design of the building, acting as a focal point at the facility’s two entrances. The original design included a three-part metal mansard roof with a trough gutter between the bottom two sections, about 10 feet from the eave.
Not surprisingly, that system did not operate as designed.
“These roofs were a leak issue forever,” Ed says. “The original scope of work was to remove the bottom 10 feet of the metal roof, eliminate the trough gutter, tie in new metal into the top portion, and then add a gutter on the eave. But when we started digging into it more, we found the existing metal panels throughout the roof were disintegrating.”
The team at Sutter Health opted to replace the three curved radius standing seam metal roofs, giving them a functioning roof with a 20-year warranty.
Because work on the metal roofs would get noisy, BT scheduled its crews for weekend tear-offs and installations to reduce the impact on staff and patients. The crew found a solid roof deck after the tear-off, so they installed a high temperature self-adhered underlayment, and the curved radius metal system fabricated by AEP Span, after cleaning the areas.
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