For Fire Chief James Midgely, it’s the gift that keeps giving – a 17-room, two-story home donated by the school district to the department for handson practice.

Saturday, Oct. 24, marked the first of many training sessions Pelham Fire Chief James Midgely will hold in a Burns Road home. It’s an opportunity the department hasn’t had since 2003, Midgely said.

“It’s not often that you get to work in a building, and we’re going to have it for an extended period of time,” he said. “We get a building and we get to beat the heck out of it.”

Here’s the scenario: Lt. Greg Atwood is on his hands and knees doing a sweep of a smoke-filled first floor room when the fire-ravaged ceiling collapses, leaving him caught in a nest of wires and cables.

But Atwood isn’t alone. He has instructor Pat “PJ” Johnson from Kittery, Maine, to lead him through the drill. Johnson sits off to the side where he can talk to Atwood while operating a contraption simulating a collapsed ceiling – a tangle of electrical wiring strung from a rope. The “smoke” is crumpled wax paper stuffed into Atwood’s mask.

The home is a boon to a department that normally holds weekly drills inside Town Hall and has few opportunities to train at the New Hampshire Fire Academy in Concord, Midgely said. Just walking through what to do in this situation or that scenario isn’t enough, according to Midgely. Sometimes hacking through a wall is a lot more instructive, he said.

“There are things you can’t do unless you have a building you can destroy,” Midgely said. “Simulation only goes so far, talking about things can only go so far.” That wasn’t lost on firefighter Patrick Weaver. Having a real building to use was “the most educational training” out there, he said.

Superintendent Frank Bass said the School Board purchased the $124,000 home and 3.5 acres on Oct. 15. The district wants use the land as additional parking space for the high school or a permanent kindergarten facility. Either way the home will be demolished, he said. Once the sale was completed, the board decided to ask the Fire Department if they wanted to use the home for training, Bass said. “(Bass) sent me an e-mail asking if we wanted it and I said, ‘Heck yeah we want it,’” Midgely said.

Bass dropped off the keys last Monday and Midgely has been busy organizing firefighting drills ever since. He’s opened the building up to other area departments as well, including nearby Hudson, Salem and Windham. The Dracut, Mass., Fire Department has already signed on, he said.