Yeah but the headline, “power lines spark before earthquake” just don’t click the same.

It’s not, according to the article. It happened 3 minutes before the quake in this case

And it’s commonly across the world before earthquakes.

Analysing 65 earthquake light incidents for patterns in a 2014 study, adjunct physics professor and and NASA researcher Friedemann Freund described the phenomenon “as if you switched on a battery in the Earth’s crust”.

Kind of fascinating.