Making hot sauce and working to save wetlands

AVERY ISLAND, La. (AP) — As storms grow more violent and Louisiana loses more of its coast, the family that makes Tabasco Sauce is fighting erosion in the marshland that buffers its factory from hurricanes and floods.

Overall, the effort is probably a standoff, says CEO and president Harold “Took” Osborn, great-great-grandson of the McIlhenny Co.’s founder. But in a state that has lost 2,000 square miles (5,200 square kilometers) of its coast since 1932, holding your ground is a victory.

The company has been brewing Tabasco Sauce since 1868 on Avery Island — the tip of a miles-deep column of salt — and now fills up to 700,000 bottles a day, selling them in 195 countries and territories.

While sinking land is a problem throughout southern Louisiana, Avery Island and four smaller salt domes along the Gulf Coast are still slowly rising.

But the danger from hurricanes remains. A 20-foot (6.1-meter) high, $5 million earthen levee now encloses the 40 acres (16 hectares) or so around Tabasco's factory because Hurricane Rita’s storm surge pushed floodwaters within inches (centimeters) of it in 2005.

Much of the wetlands work is low-tech, enlisting volunteers to plant marsh grass in the 30,000 acres (12,100 hectares) around the small island a bit north of Barataria Bay, one of the areas hit hardest by the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Osborn holds a master’s degree in environmental science from Oxford University, but one might say conservation is in his DNA. The company's founder, Edmund McIlhenny, was a self-taught naturalist. Osborn's great-grandfather, E.A. McIlhenny, created an egret rookery at the island in 1895 because the birds were nearing extermination by hunters who sold their plumage to adorn women's hats.

In recent decades, McIlhenny Co. has armored shores...