I sent Tom Schmidlin a copy of the first post. Tom is in my homebrew club and is now a pro brewer (PostDoc Brewing Co.). He was in a similar situation a few years ago when Vinnie Cilurzo handed out some oak chips that came from one of Russian River's beers.
(Tom is also on the AHA's governing committee and is one of the moderators of the AHA forum.)
Tom Schmidlin wrote:It might be ok to just throw them in. I did with Vinnie's chips, but
those were not ground up barrel. Vinnie threw a shitload of oak chips
into a beer, then pulled them out after some length of time and gently
dried them. Then they were bagged and distributed.
Depending on how they got the chunks, depends on what I would do with
them. The safest bet, pull a large enough sample to cover the chunks
and let them sit for a few days, then smell/taste before deciding
whether to toss them in the full batch or not.
Edit: He also followed up with this:
Tom Schmidlin wrote:The other thing to do is, if it smells even a little bit
off, wait another couple of days. It won't hurt the finished product
to delay, but you can't unfuck it once you throw them in.