Split batch with multiple personalities

I brewed my first 10 gallon recipe, a high gravity (1.067) IPA. When I chilled the wort, I recirculated into the same vessel and once I hit the right temperature I dumped into two separate 5 gallon fermenting buckets.

In each bucket I pitched one package of dry yeast (Nottingham). Two days later, one of the buckets has blown it's top with crazy activity (first for me) and the other shows no sign of active fermentation.

Can I assume that one package of yeast was a dud? I heard about the Nottingham recall. Can I take some of brew/yeast from the active bucket and dump it in the other to get things going? I don't have any spare yeast to pitch. Should I mix both buckets and then redistribute?

Wellll, I would hesitate to do that. A couple of reasons. First, most people say 3-4 days to start fermentation is no big deal. Secondly, one of the buckets might be infected. I would pick up some more yeast. If I absolutely had no other alternative, I might try to use the first batch to start fermentation on the second one. You can do a search on here for pitching yeast and see the best method for doing it. Luck and let us know how it turms out - Dwain

I had a split batch where I pitched notty into one 5G and US-05 into the other 5G. The notty didn't start for several days and now it tastes infected, but I'm going to let it keep going and see if I can tolerate drinking it sometime. I think I've had three very slow starts with notty over the last couple of months; going to stick with US-05 until it proves me wrong.