Unsightly and potentially disease-carrying balls of sewage have been washing up onto some of the Island's most beautiful beaches, The Royal Gazette has learned.

If the problem continues or worsens it could lead to beaches along Bermuda's celebrated South Shore being closed periodically to the public until the situation is brought under control.

The grey, golf ball sized lumps of human waste are created from when sewage pumped offshore in outfall pumps interacts with grease, Environmental Health Officer George Simons told The Royal Gazette yesterday.

Wave action rolls the clumping grease and solid waste into a circular formation leaving grey grease and sewage balls on the sand which stand out from the pinkish beige clean sand.

The balls do not emit an odour unless someone steps on them, at which points its becomes all too evident what they are.

"They are impregnated with waste," Mr. Simons said. "Once squashed the smell is the first thing to hit you."

When the situation was investigated on Tuesday, The Royal Gazette found roughly a half a dozen of the sewage balls at the western end of Elbow beach, a tourist favourite.

However, on a second trip yesterday, there was no evidence of the sewage problem in the area.

"The problem is not weekly or even monthly," said Mr. Simons. "At best it is periodic but there is a large nuisance factor."

And Elbow Beach is not the only beach which has been affected, he explained, with wind direction generally dictating where the waste will wash up.

While Elbow Beach has been a trouble spot this summer, the same problem has closed a Mid Ocean Club beach for days in the past, Mr. Simons said.

"What we do is ask them to cordon off the area of the beach affected," he said. "We do an assessment, then they go in and clean it up. Once it is cleaned to our satisfaction, we allow them to re-open the beach."

Unfortunately there is no short-term solution to tackle the beach nuisance and health hazard.

Mr. Simons said two South Shore hotels - Elbow Beach and Sonesta Beach - have been pumping sewage offshore for years.

Sonesta has recently gone online with a new sewage treatment plant, however, while The Royal Gazette was told Elbow will be putting plans before the Development Applications Board to build one soon.

Calls to the Elbow Beach Hotel communications office to confirm this yesterday went unanswered however.

But the greatest contributor to the problem is actually outfall pipes from the Corporation of Hamilton, Mr. Simons said, "by far".

"Right now the engineers at the Corporation of Hamilton are trying to figure out how to make a concerted effort to remove grease from the outfall system so that it doesn't get through," he said.

"Right now there is only a screening system, there is no treatment system and everything is mingling."

With Hamilton's many restaurants and businesses feeding into the pipes, grease is collected and then pumped out to sea.

The waste is collected in pits along the shoreline and them pumped out to sea in pipes which stretch past the offshore reef barrier.

The waste is pumped out completely untreated. This system was thought effective in the past as it was believed that the high salinity of the sea and its volume would dilute the effects of sewage.

"They thought there would be a rapid die off," Mr. Simons said.

When grease collects with the faecal matter, however, it prevents the water from breaking it down.

The waste and suspended grease hit the cooler sea water and clump together. Then wave action rolls the sludge into balls which the tides carry to the shore.

The outer shell of the balls can dry and become rigid but they do break open exposing the untreated human waste inside.

In trying to find a short term solution to the problem, the hope is to remove or isolate the grease before it interacts with the sewage.

"We might ask all the restaurants in town to put in grease interceptors," Mr. Simons said.

If the waste balls do not stop rolling in, the Health Department has no choice but to close off the beaches when they appear.

Looking long-term, a sewage treatment plant for the city is likely to be the only real solution, Mr. Simons added.

Getting to that stage, however, may be no small battle as even if all the stakeholders - Government, businesses, the Corporation of Hamilton - agree finding a location for such a treatment plant will also be a challenge in the age of NIMBY-ism (Not in My Back Yard).

"This will definitely be long-term," Mr. Simons said. "For now, we're trying to come up with a solution that gets the grease out of the system."

Meanwhile, if beachgoers notice the grey waste balls they are encouraged to call Environmental Health and report them so action can be taken quickly to protect the public.