It's like the stories you've read about the California gold rush, but this rush is to West Virginia's northern panhandle and the lure is natural gas.

There are traffic jams in this Wetzel County town, even at mid-day. Almost anything that fits on a trailer can be seen moving up and down Route 2. To ease the congestion, the industry voluntarily suspends truck movement on secondary roads during the hours school buses operate.

Take a back road when school buses aren't running and you are likely to be slowed by a convoy of tractor-trailers moving entire sets of drilling equipment to a new Marcellus Shale well site.

Visit a well site and you'll see the expected: Workers clad in heavy outdoor work clothing, climbing rigs, moving equipment and working in trailers that are half offices and half homes away from home. The surprise isn't that there are so many people drilling for gas - it is that so many others are involved. Examples:

A technician from Wyoming who works for Datacom spends his days setting up satellite dishes to provide Internet service to drilling sites. His company is paying $24,000 a month for the broadband it provides so the region's drillers have high-speed connections to the world.

Jim McCune of the state Division of Highways spends his days overseeing projects like the 8-mile, $3-million road Gastar Exploration is building to access its Marshall County well sites. McCune's new title: "District Oil and Gas Coordinator."

Last Thursday an Ohio West Virginia Paving Co. crew was blacktopping one end of the Gastar road and a Monroe Excavating crew was paving the other end.

"We have a lot of roads where we own the right-of-way but don't maintain it," McCune said. "Gastar wanted to use this right-of-way to access their sites. They asked us for permission to restore it. We looked over their design and approved it. This is good for them and good for us. If they build and maintain this road, it gets traffic off the highways. Gastar has been very cooperative with us."

Mike McCown, vice president of Gastar Exploration's northeast region, said, "We want to work with the locals. We're going to be here a long time." One homeowner asked if Gastar would create a small turnout for his vehicles. That was no problem, McCown said. Without anyone asking, Gastar - as a goodwill gesture - often adds a few yards of gravel to the apron where private drives meet the paved road.