Abstract | Oil and gas onshore steel buried pipelines are hazardous structures, thus mitigating their potential failure due to faulting is a research topic of significant interest. Conventional preventive measures that are currently used in practice aim at reducing pipe-soil friction, so that the pipeline is more free to deform within the soil and occurring tensile and compressive strains do not exceed certain limits. In the present study a different approach is examined, namely the introduction of flexible joints between adjacent pipeline steel parts in the vicinity of fault crossing, in order to concentrate strains at these joints and drastically reduce developing strains on steel pipe parts. Advanced numerical models are adopted to investigate the behavior of continuous pipelines and pipelines with flexible joints under strike-slip fault offset. Numerical results highlight the effectiveness of flexible joints in terms of reducing resulting strains, while a parametric study on pipe-fault crossing angle indicates the angle range within which flexible joints are effective.