All undergraduate students must provide an emergency notification number to the university in order to register for Winter Quarter classes, Northwestern officials announced Tuesday.

Six months after the Virginia Tech shooting, NU administrators announced their official plans for emergency communication. Through a combination of text messaging, phone calls and an outdoor alert system, NU hopes to reach the entire university community in the event of an emergency in or around campus.

“We believe it is critically important to be able to communicate with people in a timely basis in the event of an emergency, and to do that we need to have your cell phone number or local number where you can be reached,” said Alan Cubbage, vice president for university relations.

“We understand not everybody has a cell phone. We understand that people are not always sitting in their apartment, but what we need is what is the best possible number to reach you.”

Cubbage said the emergency contact information each student has provided is used only to notify a student’s family if something happens to that student.

The new information, which students must submit through CAESAR by pre-registration Nov. 5 or regular registration Nov. 12 to prevent a hold, will help the university prevent harm to students, he said.

NU is in the final stages of contract negotiations with two firms that will institute these changes, said Eugene Sunshine, NU senior vice president for business and finance. One firm will coordinate the technology to call or text students, staff and faculty. The other firm will set up and install an outdoor alert system, consisting of loudspeakers around campus that will broadcast sirens and live or pre-recorded messages.

In the event phone systems are overloaded and unavailable in an emergency situation, which happened during the Minneapolis bridge collapse over the summer, the outdoor alert system will be used to contact the university community, a university press release stated.

“The ability to communicate to a very large constituency – faculty, staff, students, visitors to campus – is a real challenge,” Sunshine said. “The whole thing is complicated, but it calls out for the university to plan for it and provide overlapping means of emergency communications.”

NU will begin testing the new systems in Winter Quarter, and they should be in place by early 2008, Sunshine said. The administration currently utilizes campuswide e-mails and online announcements to inform students of an emergency.

“With the range of emergencies that can fall upon a community today, it just makes good sense to plan for emergency communications,” Sunshine said.

Cubbage said the text messaging and automated mass call-out systems are often used in K-12 schools to notify parents of general reminders, such as school holidays and closings, in addition to emergency situations. NU plans on using the technology mainly for campus emergencies, he said.

“We do not intend to use it for that kind of general reminder purpose, at least at this point we are not intending to,” Cubbage said. “What we intend to use it for is emergency purposes. We may end up using it for others, but at this point, basically what we are talking about is emergency notification.”

McCormick junior David Buch said he feels the new emergency communication system is important, but he is opposed to the idea of the system being used for other purposes.

“There are other ways of notifying people on campus of what’s going on,” he said. “If it was clearly stated that it was used for a disaster situation, it should only be used for that and I would be happy to give my number.”

Reach Tommy Giglio at [email protected].