Having experienced the 6th largest earthquake ever recorded by a seismograph [1] I can assure you the lights I saw during that night were a lot brighter and higher in the sky, so power lines and transformers are ruled out. I was living fairly close to the epicenter (about 18 miles from the picture you can see in the wikipedia) and the lights were up for several minutes after the electricity went out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquake