I read a couple of articles a couple of months back on survival websites suggesting that a straw is a really really useful thing to include in a survival kit. There was even a link to a product on Amazon consisting of a long, sturdily built stainless steel straw (it was meant specifically for firebuilding as it lets you blow air into a very small area to help expand a tiny ignition source without hyperventilating). Other than firebuilding, the main use suggested for a straw was recovering water from very shallow sources.
It seems to me that there should be several ways to recover spilled liquids in the game. Mop it up with a rag and wring it out again, aspirate it through a tube into a bag (or basin or jar or bulb or --if it’s a safe liquid in the first place-- your mouth), suck it up with a wet/dry vac, dig a hole and squeegee it in, suck it into a steamed bottle (you never saw that trick in science?), use two jars and some tubing with a bottle of water (this is the rig that they used to treat sucking chest wounds before they invented an electric pump to do it, look it up), throw down kitty litter (or another absorbant: sand, clay, styrofoam for gas or diesel, sawdust, etc) and distill it off afterwards. There’s lots of ways to do this. Some of them might lose a certain amount of your liquid. You might need to filter it or treat it in some other manner to make it usable. But you can definitely recover spilled liquids if there’s a good reason to do so.
