Appleton firefighters saw a five percent increase in the number of calls last year, with just over 5,000. There were nearly 3,400 EMS calls, and they were also up five percent. Battalion Chief Joe Strauss says there was an 18 percent drop in the number of fires, to 100. Strauss says over the past 10 years, the number of overall calls has more than doubled. The department responded to 560 false alarms last year. Eighty-seven percent of them were unintentional alarms, or system malfunctions.