Hurricane Jova floods Mexico's main Pacific port
MANZANILLO/PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico (Reuters) - Hurricane Jova flooded the streets of Mexico's main Pacific port with torrential rain on Wednesday, inundating several popular beach resorts and injuring at least two people.
Streets in the port city of Manzanillo were underwater, communities along the coast were flooded and roads were blocked due to fallen trees and washouts after Jova, now a tropical storm, hit the coast as a Category Two hurricane late on Tuesday.
Highways leading northwest from Manzanillo along the coast were closed and the beach towns of Zihuatlan, Melaque and Barra de Navidad were swamped with floodwaters, according to the Red Cross. There were no reports of deaths.
"The streets of Manzanillo are impassable, as are the highways connecting Manzanillo with the south of Jalisco," national Red Cross coordinator Isaac Oxenhaut said.
Some streets in Manzanillo were under 3 feet (1 meter) of water and the port -- Mexico's busiest for cargo -- remained closed to traffic, although a handful of shops were reopening.
Farther west in the coastal town of Melaque, local musician Roberto Orozco said he was forced to take shelter on higher ground after his entire block was flooded.
"I got back to find my stove and my fridge swimming," said Orozco, 52. "We're really sad, we lost everything."
In nearby Tomatlan, the roof of a house collapsed during the storm, injuring two children who were taken to hospital.
Blowing winds that reached 65 mph, Jova was about 15 miles east of the tourist resort of Puerto Vallarta at 8 a.m. PDT (1500 GMT), the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
The Miami-based NHC said the center of Jova crossed the coast near the town of Chamela in the state of Jalisco, on a stretch of land dotted with beaches south of Puerto Vallarta. Mexico has no major oil installations in the Pacific.
Puerto Vallarta, which suffered bad flooding when hurricane Kenna hit in 2002, was spared from the storm overnight.
Jalisco authorities had protectively set up some 70 shelters. There were no evacuations in Puerto Vallarta but people were brought to safety from Zihuatlan and Melaque.
On Tuesday workers scrambled to fill and stack sandbags to protect the professional beach volleyball courts on Puerto Vallarta's coast, where events from the Panamerican Games are scheduled to be staged this week.
The NHC downgraded Jova to a tropical storm and the Mexican government lifted bad weather warnings south of Manzanillo. The storm will likely dissipate completely by Friday, but could still cause life-threatening mud slides and floods, the NHC said.
PORT CLOSED
Jova could produce up to 12 inches of rainfall over four western Mexican states, with isolated rainfall of up to 20 inches, the hurricane center said.
Manzanillo, Mexico's main point of arrival for cargo containers, has been closed since late on Sunday and about 13 container ships are stuck in the port. [ID:nN1E7990YF] Heavy rain and strong winds hit the port for most of Tuesday.
The port handles about 750 containers of cargo a month and ships goods including cars, car parts, cattle, minerals and tequila to Asian and North American markets.
Farther south, a tropical depression named Twelve E formed overnight, prompting the Mexican government to issue a tropical storm warning from Barra de Tonala southeastward to the Mexico-Guatemala border, the NHC said.
Carrying winds of 35 miles per hour, the depression was headed north toward the Pacific coast and could become a tropical storm later on Wednesday, the center said.
It will probably produce rainfall of 5 to 10 inches in the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Chiapas and parts of Guatemala -- and as much as 15 inches in some areas, the NHC said.
(Writing by Krista Hughes and Dave Graham; Editing by Xavier Briand)