With rapid developments of metro construction in China

the safety evaluation of pipelines near tunneling is one of the key technical problems urgent to solve. On the basis of understanding basic laws of ground movements

an empirical or semi-empirical method to evaluate the safeties of flexible pipelines is put forward; and it takes the deformation as the control index. Generally the details of pipelines are not necessary to know

and only a few parameters are involved; so the method is more easy to use in engineering; and it can be used to evaluate the latent damages of flexible pipelines rapidly. The method is particularly fit for the case of no sufficient data or especially sensitive pipelines

where the joints must be treated separately and the conservative estimations are needed.