Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in West Bend, IA

West Bend is a small city straddling the line between Palo Alto and Kossuth counties in northwestern Iowa, with the county line running along 580th Avenue.

West Bend got its start in the early 1880s with the building of the Burlington, Cedar Rapids and Northern Railway, and it was the first town in Palo Alto County.

The town was originally called Ives, after the president of the railroad, but the townspeople had it changed to West Bend, after the bend in the river.

West Bend is famous for the Grotto of the Redemption, a series of nine contiguous grottos occupying a full city block and built from minerals, petrified wood and semiprecious gems.

The Grotto of the Redemption is considered the largest man-made grotto in the world.

The Grotto was the work of Father Paul Dobberstein, the local Catholic pastor, who as a young seminarian had vowed to build a shrine to the Virgin Mary if he survived a bout of pneumonia; he spent a decade gathering stones from around the world before construction began in 1912.

Dobberstein worked on the Grotto for 42 years until his death in 1954, and parishioner Matt Szerensce and successor pastor Father Louis Greving carried the work forward after him.

Together the nine grottoes depict scenes from the life of Jesus, and the shrine draws tens of thousands of visitors a year to a farming town of fewer than 800 people.

The 2020 census counted 791 people in West Bend, living in 351 households.

West Bend is an unusually old community by age: its median resident was 52.8 years old in 2020, and about a third of its residents were 65 or older.