Flowers from a Watsonville nursery damaged by a rare December tornado were on their way to Pasadena Friday to be used on a float in the parade.

Dave Kitayama of the Kitayama Brothers Nursery said flowers from their damaged greenhouses -- 3,000 Gerbera Daisy blooms -- would be not be sold but were donated to be used by Cal Poly Float Project for the annual Rose Parade.

After a five-day investigation, the National Weather Service confirmed late Thursday that a F-1 tornado with winds of about 75miles per hour formed on Saturday from a waterspout that formed over the Monterey Bay, crossed the beach and moved inland at around 6:59 a.m.

"From a combination of radar data, damage survey assessment and witness statements, it is concluded that the tornado took an intermittent path of 1.07 miles with a width of 20 yards," weather officials said in a prepared statement.

"It's definitely a pretty rare occurrence,” Logan Johnson, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Monterey, told the Santa Cruz Sentinel. "It's something that can go several years between happenings."

Johnson said the last record of a tornado touching down in Watsonville was about 10 years ago.

Kitayama told KTVU that the twister destroyed three greenhouses and damaged another three greenhouses.

Eighty thousand square feet of production was affected when the tornado ripped off roofs and opened the sides of the structures, he said.

Kitayama said while the damage was still being assessed, the company “was very fortunate that no one was injured.”