Forecasters said the storm would continue to weaken and the center would move over land late Friday or Saturday.

Heavy rain started Friday night in Puerto Vallarta and rainfall was expected to accumulate from 6 to 10 inches in many spots. Mexican authorities canceled school in 11 communities expected to be hit by heavy rains in Jalisco state. Emergency workers prepared emergency shelters, many of them in empty school classrooms.

The state was placed on high Friday night as the storm center neared land, and emergency officials in Puerto Vallarta said they were closely monitoring villages that had been hit by flooding and mudslides in previous hurricanes and tropical storms.

Rains and 6-foot (2-meter) high waves pelted Melaque, a beach town on the Bahia de Navidad, about 60 mph (100 kilometers) east of the sparsely populated stretch of coast where the storm’s center was expected to come ashore during the night.

Category 2 Hurricane Jova hit the area in October, killing six people and flooding parts of Melaque and neighboring Barra de Navidad.

“There was a lot of flooding in the whole area, and we lost electricity,” recalled Rafael Galvez, manager of the Hotel Bahia in Melaque. But this week, he said, only seven of his hotel’s 26 rooms were occupied, and none of the hotel’s guests were planning to leave.

The hurricane center said the storm would hit land, move a little inland and then make a U-turn and head back out into the Pacific. Rain, rather than wind, could be the big threat, with the center warning of the “potential for life-threatening mudslides” in steep terrain inland.

The government of Jalisco state prepared hundreds of cots and dozens of heavy vehicles such as bulldozers that could be needed to move debris.

Officials in Puerto Vallarta said they were in close contact with managers of the hundreds of hotels in the city in case tourists need to move to eight emergency shelters, but on Friday night they said that appeared unlikely. It said the sea along the city’s famous beachfront was calm, but swimming had been temporarily banned as a precaution.

A separate storm was pounding much of Cuba and the Bahamas on Friday. Cuba’s civil defense agency reported that a French citizen, Alain Manaud, and Silvestre Fortun Alvarez of Cuba were missing after trying to cross rain-swollen rivers, according to the government’s Prensa Latina news agency. It said a search for them was continuing.

An official at the French Embassy in Havana said Manaud was 66 and had lived in Cuba for several years. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly.

The agency quoted government meteorologists as saying more than 20 inches (500 millimeters) of rain had fallen on parts of the central province of Sancti Spiritus.

The hurricane center reported that the system had about a 70 percent chance of becoming a tropical or subtropical cyclone.

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Associated Press writers Mark Stevenson in Mexico City and Anne-Marie Garcia in Havana contributed to this report.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, names Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Secretary of the Army John McHugh, Deputy Chief of Staff Lt. Gen Thomas Bostick and Assistant Army Secretary Thomas Lamont. It is the first lawsuit to challenge the combat ban, according to University of Virginia Law School professor Anne Coughlin, who led an effort to look into the policies.

Command Sgt. Maj. Jane Baldwin and Col. Ellen Haring allege the policies have hindered their career advancement, and that continued enforcement of the policy unconstitutionally bars women from certain positions available to men, restricts current and future earnings, their opportunities for advancement and their future retirement benefits.

The lawsuit also notes that women are already serving in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and instead of assigning them to combat units, the military is purposefully and deliberately circumventing the exclusion by “attaching” them to such units. In doing so, however, the policies put the women in more danger than their male counterparts because they’re barred from receiving combat-arms training necessary for engaging with hostile forces.

Haring has held positions as platoon leader, commander, executive officer and bridge commander over a 28-year Army career. She currently serves as a Joint Concept Officer for the Joint and Coalition Warfighting Center in Suffolk, Va. The lawsuit argues that Haring’s options “were limited to support positions with no possibility to compete within the combat arms.”

The ban also has caused Baldwin and Haring to “suffer invidious discriminatory treatment in a work environment that institutionalizes the unequal treatment of women solely because of their sex and notwithstanding their individual abilities,” the lawsuit said.

Department of Defense spokesman Todd Breasseale declined to comment specifically Friday about the lawsuit. But he said Panetta “remains strongly committed to examining the expansion of roles of women in the U.S. military, as evidenced by the recent step of opening up thousands more assignments to women.”

Under that change, female officers and non-commissioned officers will be assigned to combat units below the brigade level. The change will open up about 14,000 new jobs for women in the military, but there are still more than 250,000 jobs that remain closed to women.

The new jobs within combat battalions are in personnel, intelligence, logistics, signal corps, medical and chaplaincy. The Army is also opening jobs that were once entirely closed to women, such as mechanics for tanks and artillery and rocket launcher crew members.

“The Department remains committed to removing barriers that prevent service members from rising to their highest potential, based on each person’s ability and not constrained by gender-restrictive policies,” Breasseale said.

The lawsuit stems from an initiative by Coughlin, a law professor specializing in gender discrimination, and several U.Va. law students. The Molly Pitcher Project, named after a woman who was on the front lines of the Revolutionary War, examined whether excluding women from combat roles could be challenged in court, whether they harmed women and whether those women wanted to seek legal action.

“In every place in the U.S., employers are forbidden to rely on sex as proxy for fitness for the job, but in the military, sex is a proxy for fitness for combat,” Coughlin said Friday. “With wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, what we’re seeing is women working in combat theaters, fighting and dying for their country. The practical question is: How can we continue to justify formal discrimination?”

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Zinie Chen Sampson can be reached at https://www.twitter.com/zinie