NEW ORLEANS -- A solemn parade of uniformed officials and horses typically marks the funeral of a New Orleans police officer.

But the funeral Wednesday of Sgt. Paul Accardo fell far short of that: No horses. No parade. Not a single uniformed member of the New Orleans police department in attendance. The flooding of New Orleans meant that Sgt. Accardo, a New Orleans police spokesman who shot himself to death Saturday, was eulogized 75 miles away, in Baton Rouge. Nor did the body then proceed to the New Orleans cemetery where Sgt. Accardo wanted to be buried. Some family members and friends wore T-shirts to the funeral because their Sunday clothes were ruined in the flood.

"This isn't his city," said Cpl. Don Kelly, police spokesman in Baton Rouge.

Few cities bury their dead in the high style of New Orleans, where funerals can last a week, feature jazz bands as well as parades and draw bigger crowds than weddings do. But those traditions are, for the time being, yet another casualty of Hurricane Katrina. The same flood that ended so many lives in New Orleans shut down most of the city's institutions of death -- its funeral homes, churches and cemeteries. It also scattered the crowds that make New Orleans funerals so extraordinary.

For thousands of survivors, this loss could complicate the effort to accept the death of a loved one. "It means the end of the world to these people if they can't bury their dead in the traditional manner," says Larry Moore, general manager of the Rabenhorst Funeral Home in Baton Rouge.

Thursday, a woman, her daughter and son-in-law held a short funeral service for the woman's husband, a 59-year-old man who died in the aftermath of the storm. Unable to reach family members displaced in the evacuation of New Orleans, the three sat alone sobbing in a small chapel at Mothe Funeral Home in suburban Harvey, as Boyd Mothe, a funeral-home official read the 23rd Psalm. Mr. Mothe, who described the service, wouldn't identify members of the family by name.

They had held the hastily arranged service to beat the local government's order that residents leave by the end of the day.

The woman had returned to Jefferson Parish on Monday, only to find her husband dead in their home, where he had stayed behind while the others headed to Houston as the storm approached. It's likely he died of asphyxiation from the exhaust of his electric generator. "She started to cry as she was telling me she didn't want to have to cremate him because of the condition of the body," says Mr. Mothe, whose family-run company runs 13 funeral homes in the region, several of which are still flooded.

In the end cremation wasn't necessary, and the body was interred before noon at Westlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum.

Among the biggest adherents of the New Orleans funeral tradition are those most affected by Hurricane Katrina: impoverished blacks whose burial processions often feature parades and jazz bands. Some scholars have traced these so-called jazz funerals back to Africa. Duke University professor Karla F.C. Holloway says slaves brought to America burial processions involving call-and-response chants and musicians beating drums and tambourine-like instruments to help the dead on their way to heaven.

"The slaves in New Orleans would always accompany the dead to the burial site with rejoicing, because the rejoice was a release into a different kind of spiritual world, an ancestral world, which mixed with the Christian idea of being released into heaven," says Dr. Holloway.

In recent years, the tradition took a turn, when street gangs adopted the ritual to bury their murdered members. Then, the tradition gained a hip-hop quality. One of the biggest jazz funerals in recent years was for James "Soulja Slim" Tapp, an up-and-coming rapper who was fatally shot on his mother's front lawn. Soulja Slim's jazz funeral in 2003 sent thousands into the city's streets.

So deeply connected are music and death in New Orleans that the Web site of the Orleans Parish Coroner features the sound of its chief, Frank Minyard, playing the jazz trumpet.

But Katrina began wrecking that tradition even before making landfall. Death notices published in the days before the hurricane arrived struck tentative notes. "The service for Jennie is contingent on the current storm conditions," read the obituary for 63-year-old Jennie Marie Latino, who was scheduled to be buried on the morning Katrina hit New Orleans.

Now, the dead in New Orleans include some corpses that were already lying in funeral homes before the storm hit. Some funeral homes are under water, says Gene Walters, executive director of the Louisiana Funeral Directors Association.

Some funeral homes evacuated their dead. The Mothe chain moved about 10 bodies to the Jefferson Parish Forensics Center, a new facility with plenty of refrigeration capacity. The center is now storing nearly 200 bodies of people who failed to survive the aftermath of the storm.

Tradition in New Orleans calls for open caskets. But the bodies still lying in the flooded wreckage of New Orleans won't be viewable.

Once rescue workers turn their attention from the living to the dead, corpses will be brought to a refrigerated warehouse put up after the hurricane by federal officials outside New Orleans. But already, coroners' offices across Louisiana are filling up with the dead from New Orleans, most of them people who failed to survive the evacuation. "We had four buses pull into town with DOA's among the evacuees," says Sherri Basco of the Rapides Parish Coroner's Office, a nearly four-hour drive from New Orleans.

Several coroners' offices are fielding double their usual number of fatalities, says Randolph Williams, president of the Louisiana Coroners' Association.

Funeral directors around New Orleans are receiving calls from coroners' offices far and wide, reporting the deaths of evacuees who had wished to be buried in New Orleans. But Mr. Walters of the state funeral directors' association says those wishes are going unfulfilled because of the flooded condition of New Orleans cemeteries which are above ground. They were designed that way because the city is largely below sea level. "We're recommending that these people be entombed in holding crypts, until the dead can return to New Orleans, he says.

Holding crypts and refrigeration could preserve not only the dead but also the tradition of New Orleans funerals, but not now. And not with the sheer number of Katrina victims.

In an average year, Louisiana buries 44,000 bodies. Nobody knows how many now lie in the waters of flooded New Orleans.