Escalate Event not Firing

I'm using 7.1.1. I've got an approval workflow on a shelf and it has an escalation step. It times out at 0.02 working hours and the action is Escalate. The requestor, initial approver and escalated approver all have a country set. The PWOHelperPWO table includes the details of who the request should be escalated to but the Escalate event on PWO is not firing. I'm running a custom process on this event and that's not firing. I also added a mail template for escalation to the approval step in the workflow and that's not firing either. Any ideas?