They almost certainly could, but also they would also almost certainly be prone to the same kind of embellishments of such stories as they are passed on.
The other quite reasonable hypothesis is that these are tales of the fairly rapid sea level rises that accompanied the end of the last ice age as the breaking of ice dams in the north released massive glacial floods into the North Atlantic and Pacific.
This is less reasonable: the sea rise was rapid by geological timescales, but hardly something you would notice as a massive change during a human lifetime.