By Miguel Angel Gutierrez and Mica Rosenberg
MANZANILLO/PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico (Reuters) - Hurricane Jova flooded the streets of Mexico's main Pacific port with torrential rain on Wednesday, inundating popular beach resorts and killing at least two people in a mud slide.
Streets in the port of Manzanillo were underwater, coastal communities were flooded and roads were blocked due to fallen trees and washouts after Jova, now a tropical depression, hit the coast as a Category Two hurricane late on Tuesday.
The port -- Mexico's busiest for cargo -- remained closed to traffic. Some streets in Manzanillo were under 3 feet (1 meter) of water.
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, the Red Cross said.
"The streets of Manzanillo are impassable, as are the highways connecting Manzanillo with the south of Jalisco," national Red Cross coordinator Isaac Oxenhaut said.
In the village of Jose Maria Morelos northwest of the port, a woman and her son died when a deluge of mud hit their home.
"I think they asphyxiated," Alfredo Juan de Dios, 65, said of his sister-in-law Marisol and her young son Juan Pablo after the mud brought down a wall of their house, trapping them. "I have never seen rain like this. It's caused mayhem," he added.
Outside his shattered home, Marisol's husband wept as rescue workers covered his son's body with a white sheet.
The force of the winds flipped metal roofs off homes and cut power supplies to some 107,000 users in the area.
In Melaque, local musician Roberto Orozco said he was forced to abandon his home for higher ground. "I got back to find my stove and my fridge swimming," said Orozco, 52. "We're really sad, we lost everything."
With winds that reached 35 mph, Jova was about 20 miles east-south east of Tepic at 2 p.m. PDT (2100 GMT), the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
The Miami-based NHC said the center of Jova hit the coast near the town of Chamela in the state of Jalisco, on a stretch dotted with beaches south of tourist resort Puerto Vallarta. Mexico has no major oil installations in the Pacific.
PUERTO VALLARTA SPARED
Puerto Vallarta, which suffered bad flooding when hurricane Kenna hit in 2002, was spared from the storm overnight.
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 Pan American Games are scheduled to be staged this week.
The NHC downgraded Jova to a tropical depression and Mexico lifted bad weather warnings south of Manzanillo. The storm will likely dissipate entirely by Friday, but could still cause life-threatening mud slides and floods, the NHC said.
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.
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 weakened, prompting the Mexican government to discontinue a tropical storm warning from Barra de Tonala southeastward to the Mexico-Guatemala border, the NHC said.
With winds of 35 miles per hour, the depression will probably dissipate later on Wednesday, the center said. It could 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.
(Additional reporting by Alberto Fajardo, writing by Krista Hughes and Dave Graham; Editing by Will Dunham)
