The paper mostly summarizes disperse contributions of the authors published during the last fifteen years on the scour depth at single piers. These contributions rely on unique experiments in the sense that they are systematically longer than most of those found in the literature. The characterization of the effects of flow intensity, relative sand size, flow shallowness, time and pier shape and alignment is significantly improved as compared with existing literature. Our contributions consist on refinements of the model suggested by the school of Auckland, initiated by Raudkivi and boosted by Melville and his students. A considerable number of empirical equations and charts expresses those contributions.