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Let's say that you are out backpacking and a bear spray canister accidentally goes off and gets on your skin or in your eyes or onto your clothing?
It can't be a pleasant experience as it is meant to deter bears, how can you get it off yourself and your gear in the field (as any residue could potentially either get onto your skin from the gear or potentially attract bears)?
Going straight to the source, here's a Materials Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) for Mace brand pepper spray (note that bear spray is high concentration, high volume pepper spray). Here's a snip of the relevant section:
The particular first aid recommendations are:
It can also be instructive to see videos of people being pepper sprayed (what did we ever do before the internet?). See for example this clip of Marine Training. A key realization is that the capsaicin generally does not cause direct damage, but rather activates your pain receptors (particularly the mucous membranes in your mouth, nose, and eyes). As an analogy, eating a hot pepper may make your mouth feel like it is on fire, but your tongue isn't actually burning away. It will be incredibly painful, but you are capable of keeping your eyes open and dealing with any continued threat from a bear as well as providing yourself first aid.
Your concern of what to do if you should get bear spray on yourself is not an idle consideration! I have friends who have had the following happen:
A couple closing recommendations:
The key ingredients in bear sprays are capsaicins (reference), which are also the key ingredients of classic pepper spray. Cleaning bear spray off of you or your gear is similar to cleaning pepper spray off you or your gear.
First off, it capsaicins can be an extreme irritant, and so you want to minimize harm. Stay calm, avoid rubbing affected areas or spreading the mess, and get to a well ventilated area to relieve irritation. Capsaicins themselves don't directly damage your skin - they excite your nerves as if you're being burned though, and the inflamation your body reacts with can actually cause damage in extreme cases. Minimizing your inflammatory response minimizes damage.
You'll want to neutralize and clean off the capsaicins. The internet says dairy products like milk and yogurt can help neutralize the burning sensation of capsaicins on you, but you are unlikely to have a bounty of that with you in the wild and that doesn't solve the problem of attracting bears. Capsaicins are not very water soluble, so you'll need to add something to the rinse-scrub-rinse process to remove the capsaicin oils from you or your clothing. Dish soap does this well, or any other detergent normally used for removing greases and oils. If capsaicin is on your skin, other oils can be applied to pickup capsaicin oil that hasn't yet been absorbed - vegetable oil, facial cream, petroleum jelly would be rubbed on the affected area, then washed off as you'd wash them off normally. Capsaicin oils are very soluble in alcohols, so if you have high proof alcohol that can be used to clean capsaicin from you or your gear.
As for attracting bears...I'm not sure whether dish soaps will attract them. It is possible, depending on the chemicals and scents used. I wouldn't expect the high proof alcohol to attract bears, and since capsaicins are very soluble in that, that is the ideal cleaning solution. However, how accessible is that in The Great Outdoors? Probably, not very. I'd say if you get bear spray all over you, and wash it off enough to reduce irritation to you, you should take other measures to avoid bears (eg. get out of bear territory) - this could be doubly important if you are now incidentally all out of bear spray!
I stumbled across this post after the plastic bin situation just occurred in my one of my camping bins. Apparently one of my daughters took the safety clip off and it deployed all on its own onto hammocks, sleep pads, tarps, cookware and other wonderful things. Was trying to figure out how to save my stuff, though in all likelihood they will just get thrown away.
Unfortunately I can speak to the 2 other cases mentioned above a well, in that I went through the OC training in the military, and once had my wife drop a canister with safety removed right on the trigger at face level as we down-climbed a scramble near our cabin (which was loaded with aggressive bears at the time). With regard to getting it off your skin, Johnson and Johnson baby shampoo was the military choice. We would literally shampoo our eyes. It might take a 2-3 showers to reach the point where the oils are completely off you so that you will not have recurring pains in different locations (like rinsing it out of your hair to have the oils settle on your groin).
Oh well, perhaps this will be my last interaction with high concentrations of this stuff.
