After the tornado: Watsonville's Kitayama Bros. nursery repairs damage from wind storm

WATSONVILLE -- Crews scrambled Thursday to repair a greenhouse and save hundreds of gerbera daisy plants after a tornado ripped through the Kitayama Bros. nursery on San Andreas Road.

Saturday morning, the tornado crushed one greenhouse and left three others a mess of twisted metal and shredded fiberglass. A fifth greenhouse, filled with red and yellow gerberas, was heavily damaged, putting the festive flowers at risk from rain and chilly temperatures.

Robert Kitayama, president of the company, said damages would exceed $100,000.

"Every farmer will tell you, it's always something," Kitayama said, shrugging off the loss. "It's the well. It's the weather. It's something."

A tornado, though, is unusual here.

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

Johnson confirmed the incident after visiting the nursery Wednesday and evaluating radar data. He described it as a weak tornado with winds of about 75 mph. It emerged as a water spout on the Monterey Bay and then headed inland about a mile on a path 20 yards wide.

The nursery is about a quarter mile from the coast.

Kitayama said the greenhouses were hit about 7 a.m. A few minutes later, he said, crews would have been inside clipping flowers, and the consequences could have been worse.

As it is, the nursery lost as much

as 25 percent of its lisianthus, a delicate, hard-to-grow flower that's a company specialty.

The nursery also lost part of its gerbera crop, though so far not the plants that typically produce for three years.

Kitayama said 3,000 no longer marketable gerbera blooms were sent south Thursday, a donation to Cal Poly's float in the annual Tournament of Roses Parade.

While he'll likely be short blooms for the big floral holidays of Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, "it's not a make or break" situation, he said.

The nursery lost about 40,000 square feet of its 1.8 million square feet of greenhouse space. He's also waiting to see how much of the loss insurance will cover.

Johnson said the last record of a tornado touching down in Watsonville was 10 years ago, though they aren't always reported.

If the nursery hadn't been hit and the greenhouses damaged, the twister may have whipped through the surrounding fallow agricultural fields unnoticed, Johnson said. His office only learned of the tornado because Kitayama called.

"People think we know about everything with all the computers, satellites and radar, but we don't. That's why the human element is so important to what we do," he said.

Follow Sentinel reporter Donna Jones on Twitter at Twitter.com/DonnaJonesSCS

Source: http://www.montereyherald.com/news/ci_22271186/after-tornado-watsonvilles-kitayama-bros-nursery-repairs-damage?source=rss

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