Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a seven-part series on natural gas drilling gleaned from a recent staff outing to Pennsylvania. It will continue each Thursday in The Evening Sun.

SUSQUEHANNA COUNTY, Pa. – For the last two years, much of the U.S. has been experiencing unemployment levels in the double digits, but not Pennsylvania’s Northern Tier.

At a time when much of the country has been seeing jobs disappear, the northeastern corner of the Keystone State has bucked the trend. Bradford County, which neighbors Susquehanna County to the west, led Pennsylvania in job creation last year, with some 2,000 new jobs created between September 2009 and September 2010.

According to Anthony Ventello, executive director of the Progress Authority, the vast majority of those jobs can be attributed to the area’s booming natural gas industry.

“The Marcellus Play has changed our lives. It dominates all local conversations and agendas,” Ventello has stated in testimony before both House and Senate committees in the past year.

And he should know, as his agency has been instrumental in connecting the dots between natural gas related-companies and local businesses and communities in such a way that the region can reap the economic rewards of the booming industry.