Workers at the Cigar Lake uranium mine in northern Saskatchewan spent several hours below ground while a broken elevator was tended to.

The mine, which is still in development, is located about 350 kilometres north of La Ronge, Sask. It is a joint project led by Saskatoon-based Cameco Corp.

Word of the miner's predicament was confirmed Saturday afternoon by a company spokesman who told CBC News no one was hurt.

Early Saturday, the mine operator noticed an elevator door was not working properly and 44 workers, who would have used the elevator to return to the surface at the end of their shift, were told to wait below while the equipment was repaired.

The workers could have been brought to the surface using an emergency hoist system, but that procedure would have taken longer than simply having them wait for the door to be fixed.

"There's a number of different areas in the mine where you can basically have lunch," Rob Gereghty, a spokesman for Cameco, told CBC News Saturday. "There's a lot of different activities ... so they were never in any harm there was never any danger."

Gereghty added the elevator was back in working order Saturday afternoon.

"They were never trapped underground," he added. "We do have ... other means of getting them up and we could have brought them up if we wanted to. But the decision was made to focus on fixing the hydraulics because they knew that they could repair it fairly quickly."

All the workers were back on the surface by 3 p.m. CST.