The busiest year on record for the Escalon Fire Department has just concluded – with 2017 coming in with the highest number of calls ever, said Fire Chief Rick Mello. “We had 1,124 calls and that is our most on record since we started keeping track,” Mello explained. That figure compares to the 1,002 the department responded to in 2016 and the most calls handled in a previous year topped out at 1,038 in 2008.