NEW ORLEANS – The day after Paul Accardo killed himself, Fred Fath, an auto theft detective with the New Orleans Police Department, stands on Veterans Memorial Boulevard, right where floodwaters overtake the street and tries to understand why.

“I knew this guy personally, rode with him, worked with him for six years. My knees buckled when somebody told me,” he says, squinting in disbelief. A dab of sunblock leaves a white smear on the sweaty skin below his left eye.

“He was in our camp until he left late that evening or early that morning while we were sleeping or out patrolling. He snuck out, and the next thing we knew, someone came with the news. It was rough.”

The word is an understatement. Two weeks after being broadsided by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is still wrestling with the aftermath, still having it rough. The Crescent City is a ghost town. You drive through neighborhoods where the winds have staggered power lines, ripped up trees and mangled signs like some giant vengeful child, and what strikes you most is not the damage, but the silence, the absence of sound you take for granted in normal times. No trucks rumbling by. No radio playing too loudly. No shhhhh of water spraying across the lawn. No mutter of conversation. The people are gone. Driving through, you miss what on an ordinary day you don’t even hear. And then, you turn onto Veterans Memorial Boulevard, and the street just ends, water overlapping the double yellow line that runs down the middle of the road.

Rough. Yeah, that fits.

Paul Accardo’s death is a sign of just how rough it has been. Accardo, the department’s public information officer, shot himself with his own gun. He is one of two police officers to kill himself since the storm.

And there are reports that dozens of other officers have simply turned in their badges.

“He was a hell of a guy,” says Fath of his friend. “Really nice person. I know people say that about everybody that dies: “Really nice person.’ (But) he was genuine, would do anything for anyone, bent over backward to help people.”

And he killed himself in the wake of the hurricane. It is a sobering thing, a thing to stop you in your tracks and force you to appreciate anew the immensity of what is happening here. When the world turns upside down, when that which was dependable becomes undependable, and that which was certain turns uncertain, we instinctively look to men and women in uniform to help us make sense of it all. We look to authority for clues to what we should do, how we should feel. We look to them for assurance that it will all turn out OK.

So when two police officers kill themselves, and dozens of others quit their jobs … well, let’s just say it gets your attention. If they’re despairing, what happens to the rest of us?

But Fath insists that morale remains high. “A lot of us are still strong. We’re out here trying to make things work and bring in more survivors.”

A recent survivor is a dog sitting at Fath’s feet lapping eagerly at fresh water. Fath’s colleague, narcotics detective Rick Welch, has just brought her in on a boat from a lake that used to be a neighborhood.

“Our houses, you can ride over the roof of ’em in a boat,” says Fath. “The majority of the policemen, we’ve lost everything we own right now. So we not only have to deal with what we have to deal with out here, with everybody else’s problems, but after this is over, we have to go home and make the best of what we got.”

“We’re living in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart right now,” says Welch. “What you see is what we own.”

The dog is eating kibble now. Fath looks out over the endless water. The roofs of houses are just visible above the surface.

“We’re surviving,” he says. “It’s a good thing.”

Late last Sunday, Mayor Ray Nagin announced he was pulling weary city police officers off the job and turning the city over to state and federal authorities.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for The Miami Herald. His e-mail address is: [email protected].