Symptoms
N/A
Diagnoses
N/A
Resolution
Escalation rules are tied to workflow versions. So if one were to construct an escalation rule for an activity on a given workflow, deploy said workflow and then go back and edit/re-deploy that workflow removing the escalation rule this person would then have two versions of the workflow, versions 1 and 2.
All instances of the workflow that were instantiated with version 1 as the default will retain the escalation rule whereas all instantiations with version 2 as the default (version 2 will become the default after redeploying the workflow) will not have the escalation rule.