Miami Gardens residents drop F-1 suit. Race was loud but won’t cause hearing loss

Miami Gardens residents who sought to block the Formula One Miami Grand Prix at Hard Rock Stadium dropped their lawsuit Tuesday, saying data collected during the event showed “disturbing” levels of noise but not enough to threaten hearing loss.

“The recorded sound levels, while extremely disruptive ... did not reach the sustained levels deemed by the government and [non-governmental organization] authorities to threaten hearing loss, the threshold established in the court’s prior rulings for residents to have ‘legal standing,’ ” the residents, led by former Miami-Dade County Commissioner Betty Ferguson, said in a statement.

The residents filed a voluntary motion Tuesday to dismiss the case. In their statement, they lamented their inability to challenge the event in court but vowed to keep fighting through the “political process.”

“We will continue to advocate to ensure that our elected officials enforce the laws and protect the residents of the city of Miami Gardens,” they said.

A spokesperson for the Miami Grand Prix, Jason Jenkins, said in a statement: “We are glad that these baseless claims have finally been dropped.”

“We recently presented the results of a race weekend sound study conducted by multiple acoustical engineers that confirmed what we said from the beginning: the sound did not even approach, much less exceed, dangerous levels,” Jenkins said, adding that the event “provided significant financial impact to the region and specifically Miami Gardens through the inclusion of local businesses, STEM opportunities for youth, internships for local college students and access to the event for 1,500 residents.”

In order to comply with a directive last month from Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Alan Fine, Hard Rock Stadium representatives hired a firm to collect noise measurements near the stadium at Lake Lucerne City Park at Northwest 207th Street and 23rd Avenue.

The firm took noise readings at 15-minute intervals from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. during each day of Formula One racing May 6-8, then calculated average hourly decibel levels that were later filed in court.

The hourly results ranged from 53 to 72 decibels, levels the residents say were significantly louder than usual in their neighborhoods and “far more than levels deemed acceptable by the World Health Organization and other public health agencies for sound in residential neighborhoods.”

The residents also took their own sound readings and said noise is a problem in their community even without Formula One racing. Before and after the event, they found ambient noise between 55 and 65 decibels to the north, south and east of the stadium. Those levels are “extremely high,” the residents said, calling it a “serious public health issue that should be addressed.”

(Each additional 10 decibels corresponds with a perceived doubling in sound volume.)

In their lawsuit filed in March, the residents argued that by allowing the Miami Grand Prix to go forward, the city of Miami Gardens would be violating a city ordinance that says events should not “unreasonably disturb the peace and comfort of adjacent residences.” The city law doesn’t define what noise levels would meet that threshold.

Fine ruled that the city had discretion to decide whether to issue a special events permit and said he wouldn’t block the event based on engineers’ analysis of past Formula One noise levels.

Instead, the judge said in late April that the case could move forward based on noise measurements from this year’s event, which kicked off Hard Rock Stadium’s 10-year deal to host it annually.