A report from the Department of Commerce estimates that Washington and Idaho lost between $1.35 and $2.6 billion in 2021 because of weather disasters. In the Pacific Northwest as a whole (including Oregon) that number reaches at least $3 billion. Of the four costliest weather disasters in 2021, the Northwest was impacted by two of them. We’ve reported extensively on how the drought that began in the spring of 2021 heavily impacted the Inland Northwest and is still lingering to this day. The severity of the drought went up substantially when the worst heatwave in the Pacific Northwest’s history arrived in late June. July was also the hottest month on record in the Inland Northwest.