I saw a documentary about this hypothesis a few years ago.
At the time I was aware that it divided the scientific community not so much in terms of its possibility, but in terms of the time at which it might have happened.
Furthermore, there is also some consensus that the entire mediterranean underwent a similar type of flood (though the straights of Gibraltar) at some point after the last ice age.
The idea of such floods doesn't trouble scienitsts - they are physically plausible. There is no cover up! What does trouble them is the idea of a physically impossible global flood 6000 years ago.
As for of the "historicity" of the Bible. Any text, no matter how mythical, can provide a certain amount of historical information. In that sense the Bible can be considered to be no different from the Epic of Gilgamesh.