Loss of subs leaves anxiety in wake for coastal Georgia

ST. MARY&#39;S - Business tripled for Meg Lawrence a year ago when she moved her buffet-style restaurant with its sidewalk carryout window to a shopping center two miles from Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base. <br> <br> Sailors started coming to Meg&#39;s Diner several times a week for the $7 buffet, eating barbecue ribs in their starched white uniforms. <br> <br> Like many in the southeast Georgia city of St. Marys, Lawrence anchored her economic fortunes to the nuclear submarine base and its more than nine-thousand employees. But now some of her best customers are shipping out for good. <br> <br> This summer, two of the ten Trident nuclear submarines stationed at Kings Bay will be reassigned to the West Coast - taking 636 sailors, a $27 million payroll and an estimated 1,400 family members with them. <br> <br> ``It&#39;s going to hit the economy hard. That&#39;s quite a few people to be gone all at once. I know it&#39;s going to hurt us for a while,&#34; Lawrence said. <br> <br> Lawrence recently laid off three of her five employees to brace herself for the blow, worried by the ``For Sale&#39;&#39; signs that began multiplying in her neighborhood. <br> <br> Camden County is expected to lose 4.5 percent of its 43,600 population when the submarines USS Kentucky and USS Pennsylvania leave Kings Bay for their new home base at Bangor, Washington, in May and July. <br> <br> The reshuffling is part of the Navy&#39;s decision to decommission four of its 18 ballistic missile submarines, which carry 54 percent of the nation&#39;s nuclear arsenal, so they can be reconfigured to carry conventional weapons. <br> <br> Kings Bay has been the backbone of Camden County&#39;s economy since the 1980s, when it became the East Coast base for the Navy&#39;s Trident subs. With an annual payroll of $298 million, it employs more than half the county&#39;s 17,000 workers.

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