A resident of the village of Pruzhinishchi, Oktyabrsky district, Gomel region, early in the morning observed some unusual phenomenon.
“On February 12, 2013, at about 6.30, still in the dark, I was cleaning the path from snow. Suddenly the sky lit up green. The lights in the house went out, and the street lights went out. After a couple of seconds, the sky flashed red, then green again. Everything lasted about eight seconds, no longer.
I was instinctively scared for a moment. It was dark. But soon the lights came on in the house, and a little later the lanterns. Of course, this is a small aurora, because for a meteor, the color would be uniform, white, and the light would not be switched off,”Nikolai writes.
Unfortunately, the likelihood that a local resident saw a UFO, an asteroid or such a rare in Belarus northern lights is rather small. Most likely, this was the result of the tree collapsing onto high-voltage power lines, say the Oktyabrskie Electric Networks department of Gomelenergo.
The reason for the power outages is the heavy snowfalls that came to the Gomel region: snow sticks to the wires, fell trees. And the fall of a tree on high-voltage power lines can be seen ten kilometers away,
says an employee of the enterprise. It also turned out that the village of Pruzhinishchi was still very lucky - electricity appeared there immediately after the shutdown. In other settlements, there was no power supply for a longer time.
Most of the incidents occurred on Sunday and Monday, but the power supply was restored until this morning. Several new blackouts occurred during Tuesday. As of 15:00 on February 12, there was no electricity in eight settlements and three farms. But Gomelenergo assured that "the situation is not spontaneous and will not affect milk yield in any way: all farms are equipped with electric generators."